Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Oprah Winfrey should be ashamed



I am utterly shocked by the Oprah Winfrey show on the Speech Easy device. I had never actually seen it. It is just so so bad. I have been critical of the Lidcombe trials and claims of efficacy, but this is a different league. The Lidcombe trials were just sloppy research done with good intentions but not so good scientific rigor. But the Oprah Winfrey show is about dumbing down realities, misleading, sloppy research, promising miracles, abusing the emotions of people, and getting the science wrong. They showed Ratstatter and Kalinowski as inventors of the device. That's a joke. Many people were thinking along similar lines. The worse was when Joe Kalinowski took out the device and stuttered severely. I can do that, too. And God made him suffer terribly to help others???? Wow!

I would love to know what has happened with the two guys who were on the show. We need to find out their contact details and speak to them. One is called Mark Babcock. And the others Wesley Cock?

Let us know if you have more details!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oprah is just an ignorant stupid woman who got duped and trying to make money. Don't you think the ECU Professors are the ones that should be ashamed. They know it is not a cure and not a total miracle.

Why don't you talk more about Kalinowski and his poor acting skills :)

Anonymous said...

I agree, the speech easy device is really not what it seems. They make it look like something miraculous on Oprah, but we all know that it is far from that. It may help some people depending on what type of stutter they have, but in the long run the effects wear off. To go as far as saying that 80% of the people stop stuttering immediately and make it sound like a cure is really false advertising. I would love to see what happened to those guys and if they were paid to advertise the speech easy...

Anonymous said...

Tom, this is so old, 2003. Why don't you try to get on the show, I would watch it. What would you tell Oprah and/or the world. Would people be able to understand your logic because people are stupid and ignorant. Ignorance is a major problem....