Sunday, September 18, 2011

Do specialists get better outcome than generalist clinicians?

I had an idea for some useful piece of research, which would be a change to the research time wasted on useless research.

The treatment of non-specialist SLTs always struck me as scandalous from my own experience and that of others. These are people who have visited university for four years with one course at best on stuttering by an expert, but more typically a few lectures giving by a semi-crackpot prof on what causes stuttering. Then, due to the dictatorship of academic degrees and professional qualification, society gives them the monopoly to treat people who stutter even though they have no clue whatsoever. The clever ones openly admit to their cluelessness on the matter and refuse to treat. Thank you for your professionalism and putting ethics before money! Even though you are probably the non-specialist who would best treat people who stutter! The others are the "I am a qualified SLT and I know what to do." Run, run fast!

Well that is theory! But is correct? What I want to see is the following outcome study. Take 100 people who stutter, assign them to expert SLTs and generalist SLTs, and let's see what's happening. Will the experts get better results???

Tuesday, September 06, 2011

Parry's Valsalva theory and treatment

A reader has asked me about my opinion about the Valsalva theory and treatment created by William Parry. Check out Parry's website. As two year ago, I have not made up my mind.

At best, his theory is a partial theory of stuttering and only focuses on the stuttering and blocking events. For Parry, the mis-use of the natural Valsava mechanism greatly blows up the symptoms of our inefficient speech system. Relaxation of the muscles involved in a Valsava mechanism helps reducing the tension and severity of symptoms. It seems to me that his method is similar to muscle relaxation techniques.

I have added a diagram that I found on his page that illustrates his theory. Have a look at it! Let me know of your opinion.



Monday, September 05, 2011

Self-help in Sarajevo


On Tuesday evening, we met up with Alan who is leading the effort of setting up a stuttering organisation in Bosnia. He met us at our hotel and we drove into the surrounding hills to a restaurant with a superb view over Sarajevo. He showed us pictures of his sponsored trip to attend the ISA conference in Argentina.  Without any prompting on my part, he also had a picture of the ISA board meeting, and pointed to Thomas Krall, the German representative at ISA. According to Alan, Thomas was behaving out of place and