"Should I spend $2000 on a program to help little Johnny's learning issues?"

When people find out that I'm in a cognitive science/neuroscience department, I often get questions like this:

Do you know anything about [some training program] for kids with [ADHD/dyslexia/other].  It's a little expensive but I am wondering if it would help little [Johnny/Madeline]. 

I probably haven't heard of the program you're asking me about, but here's my educated guess:

Does it cost a lot of money?  Does it invoke the word "neuroscience"?  Does it have a pretty picture of a brain with some regions colored a pretty color?  Then put down the brochure and walk away.

This may seem a bit of an extreme position to take about a hypothetical training program.  But even though I don't know about the particular program, I know that neuroscience is in its infancy.  Don't get me wrong, it's an exciting field to be in, with new discoveries all the time.  But to a first approximation we still basically have no idea what the heck is going on in the brain.  The effect of training programs on lasting changes in the brain? Forgetaboutit.  

Furthermore, here's a typical day of an occupational therapist: They spend the whole day helping individuals with difficulties. They see the same people over a long course of treatment.  They get a lot of feedback about what works and what doesn't, observing their patients doing real-world tasks.  They adapt their program to the individual.  Similarly for your child's teachers.  On the other hand, this, to a first approximation, is a typical day for a cognitive neuroscientist: They spend a few minutes to an hour running each subject through a controlled experiment.  In many cases they will never see the subject again; in some cases the subjects will come back a few times.  If an intervention doesn't help a particular subject, they don't typically try to adapt it to help that subject -- to do so would screw up their controlled experiment.  

This is not to slight cognitive neuroscience.  It aims to answer different questions than occupational therapists and educators.  But if I had to guess which field is likely to discover the utility of a training program first, I'd put my money on the OT's and teachers.