Saturday, April 30, 2011

Part of the problem

Here is an analogy that captures an important aspect of stuttering: the swallowing-a-pill analogy.

When you drink water, you swallow the water without a problem. When you have to swallow a pill, you might choke on the pill. Being aware of swallowing makes us choke.

Being aware of stuttering makes the stuttering worse.

4 comments:

Tal said...

Good analogy. Someone should compile a list of stuttering analogies. A few others:

-Chinese finger trap
-Floating in water (if you panic and start thrashing around you'll sink)
-Walking across a beam. (If it's on the floor you'd have no trouble. If it's 500 feet in the air you'd probably freak out and fall).

Leo said...

Tom, how about let's take a break from focusing on the Lidcombe.

You are fighting the wrong war. Think about what you have been doing the past few years exposing the weak evidence base of Lidcombe, have you made any significant difference? So what if you win, so what if you are correct. The Australian group would just lose funding, and that is bad for stammering research!!!

Are children who stutter better off now. Since you agree the Lidcombe cannot hurt and can only help (parents get counseled by the speech therapists).

You have bigger fish to fry!! Many evil fishes out there!!!

This is a public safety announcement.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A3QWXSN2MI5TZU/ref=cm_pdp_rev_title_1?ie=UTF8&sort_by=MostRecentReview#R2Y7KW8F94SXZ0

If I could give this program a 0 I would. I attended one of these 3-day Mcguire "stuttering boot camp" program conferences back in 2002 after they ask you to fork out over $1,000. They claim to have solved the physical aspect of stuttering by teaching you "costal breathing". This form of breathing simply tricks your mind for a few hours. To make up for this, they incorporate avoidance techniques and they force you out into public using this new breathing "technique" as soon as you learn it. What they don't tell you is how breathing this way can and will cause you severe back discomfort because of the effects breathing this way has on your spine and the muscles around it. They won't tell you how many of the so-called "mentors" have actually left the program to pursue other ways of dealing with their own stammer. Stay away from this approach. It will mess up your normal breathing patterns for years to come and will do nothing to treat the real problem of stammering.

Ora said...

"Being aware of swallowing makes us choke."

Interesting you use the term choke. This word is used for an interesting phenomenon in sports, somewhat reminescent of what happens when we stutter: "In sports, a choke is the failure of an athlete or an athletic team to win a game or tournament when the player or team had been strongly favored to win or had squandered a large lead in the late stages of the event. Someone who chokes may be known as a choker or, more derisively, as a choke artist. Choking in sport can be considered a form of analysis paralysis." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choke_%28sports%29)

Kerri Hogue said...

If the pill you are swallowing happens to be Pagoclone, that is a whole different story. What a waste of a promising medicine.