Thursday, September 24, 2009

Measuring treatment success

A reader commented:
Before Treatment: Oh, please, show us how you stutter....let your stuttering come out. 25% stuttering.

After Treatment: Now, we are going to tape record you reading a passage. 1-2% stuttering.

If you had spent $2000 going to a treatment program and the treatment director calls you for a follow up after treatment, wouldn't the PWS be afraid to show too much stuttering and just pick words carefully.

This is very true, even if you don't tell you patients this, your patient will intuitively think that that is what you expect. And even if you tell them not to think this way, their brain will. It is a real problem. It is the belly phenomena. Why are you here? Well, I have a belly and you show it. At the picture afterwards, of course you push it back your belly...

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

You can't blame people for trying to make $$$ so they can go shopping and buy expensive shoes...

Why do women have 100-200 pairs of shoes?

Measurement of treatment efficacy should be done by an independent third party. Or the stutterer wears a recorder or monitoring device (and not in the presence of an SLP or feeling the pressure to sound fluent and circumolocute)

some famous treatment programs and some private SLPs have these before and after videos.

Just like you see weight loss program advertising, before and after photos.

They should add a caption: results not typical, results may vary.

The weight loss programs do....

How do you get a refund for bad service?

Anonymous said...

Not only should measurement of treatment efficacy be done by an independent person, it should also be done in an unfamiliar environment.

I've never heard of an slp giving a refund, even though most stutterers seem to relapse after treatment. The excuses the slp usually give are, "you haven't been working enough on your speech", or "you're not using your technique". In reality it is fraud.

Anonymous said...

It is always OUR fault when "therapy" "fails"--- And it's always the "therapy" when it "works" --- You'd think we get it by now!