Thursday, June 15, 2006

Stuttering makes you sick?

I have been reading about an therapy against alcohol addiction with an unusually high success rate of 50% after five years. The secret is that the recovering alcoholics take a substance that makes them feel physically sick when drinking alcohol. The substance reacts with alcohol and creates a toxic substance.

Maybe that is what is needed, we need punishment when people start stuttering again, but then again staying fluent after a fluency shaping therapy is about keeping up practise rather than about not stuttering (drinking alcohol) again. But in a sense, relapse happens when someone is not using the new speech technique anymore and using the old one (starts the old habit like drinking again).

But here is another twist. They gave one group of alcoholics a placebo (i.e. a pill containing nothing), and they still showed the high success rate!!!! So in a sense you dont need the drug at all but you need a drug that is able to punish for new stuttering!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

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- StutteringReviews.com: read or write reviews of stuttering therapy programs, anti-stuttering devices, and anti-stuttering medications.

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Plus on my website you can download my new book No Miracle Cures: A Multifactoral Guide to Stuttering Therapy free or read six chapter excerpts from Marty Jezer's autobiography Stuttering: A Life Bound Up in Words.

Tom Weidig said...

Thx for the links.

I will have a look and discuss on my blog.

Anonymous said...

Hey Tom,
I hate the analogy of comparing stuttering to an addiction. I know various people use it, but if stuttering is caused by a difficulty, say in the basal ganglia, that is to some degree out of the control of the person who stutters, it seems wrong and unfair to encourage punishment for something. I think the comparison of stuttering to something so negative causes so many difficulties, and exacerbates the potential for people to become anxious about their speech as a result of fearing negative evaluation. I prefer analogies where there isn't an implication of fault- for example poor vision- then treatments and strategies are about optimising your abilities (e.g. wearing glassess, doing eye exercises) raher than punishment!