Censorship at the British Stammering Association Facebook page

Wow, I have just witnessed censorship on the British Stammering Association Facebook page. I saw this post and suddenly it was gone.

Interestingly, on another occasion some time ago, Norbert Liekfeldt has blocked me as a Facebook friend for my Facebook posts. Norbert has a problem accepting other people's views if they clash with his own ideology. Especially when they are politically incorrect according to him, which is not ideal for a neutral manager.

As you know, I am for full transparency and open debate. That's why I will post the screenshot here. Things need to be discussed (even if politically not correct) not suppressed! This has been a major disease of the last decade in the UK.

A very important question to Onslow and Packman

Onslow and Packman write in a response to the controversy of Lidcombe becoming the state-sanctioned treatment of choice:

"Indeed, if such evidence emerges for the efficacy of another treatment for early stuttering, we would encourage Speech Pathology Australia to approach the Australian government to consider it also for taxpayer-assisted support."

Here is the key question to them:

The Franken study has shown that there is no difference in efficacy between Lidcombe and a second treatment approach Demands And Capacities. So I ask:

As Lidcombe is effective (according to you) and the Franken study shows a similar efficacy for Demands & Capacities, does that constitute enough evidence to use Demands & Capacities in Australia too?

Deborah Theodoros has been misinformed about the efficacy of Lidcombe

The Australian Speech and Language Association's president Deborah Theodoros seems to be badly misinformed about the efficacy of Lidcombe as she wrote in her statement on Graig Coleman's concern about making Lidcombe the treatment of choice in Australia:

"early stuttering intervention at a level which is demonstrated to be highly efficacious and supported by the strongest level of evidence."

As I understand she is not an expert in stuttering so someone must have whispered in her ear and she refused, so far, to lend her other ear to an opposing opinion. Her statement is completely overblown. (check also my first response to the debate)

Let's deconstruct her statement: "demonstrated to be highly efficacious:"

This is simply not the case if you look at the long-term data and if you know, like me, the many cases clinicians tell me about where it did not work. Even Onslow, Packman, et al's recognize that

At the time of this follow-up, the children were aged 7-12 years, with a mean of 5 years post-randomization in the 2005 trial. Twenty of the 29 children in the treatment arm and eight of the 25 children in the control (no treatment) arm were able to be contacted. Of the children in the treatment group, one (5%) failed to complete treatment and 19 had completed treatment successfully and had zero or near-zero frequency of stuttering. Three of the children (16%) who had completed treatment successfully had relapsed after 2 or more years of speech that was below 1% syllables stuttered. Meaningful comparison with the control group was not possible because an insufficient number of control children were located and some of them received treatment after completing the trial.

To conclude, the treatment was not "highly efficacious" at all, especially if you compare it to the natural recovery rate of 70%-80%. And due to the small number of 29 children, the statistics are bad. And there was no control group to control for natural recovery, so you cannot actually judge the relative performance to a non-treated group.

The statement "supported by the strongest level of evidence." is, as you can see, completely overblown.

Deborah Theodoros should seek independent counsel on this matter to counter the notion that her statement and her association projects a certain carelessness regarding dissenting opinion. She cannot just hear the arguments of those that have worked hard to create and establish, and then also measure the treatment; a clear conflict of interest. All in good intention but nevertheless Lidcombe is neither "highly efficacious" nor supported by "the strongest level of evidence."

Lidcombe the only effective treatment in Australia?

US cultural imperialism, this time for good reasons, has struck Australia. The Australian government and speech and language association has plans to make Lidcombe the unique treatment option available for clinicians to treat stuttering kids, because it is the most studied and has been proven effective. As we all know, this campaign is very likely led by Prof Onslow and his people. He is very much Mr Stuttering in Australia, and sucks up most of the research funding and probably sits on the research council board to decide on other people's funding. He was also so kind to send me a nice letter from his university's lawyer a few years ago, and was very eager to have a few nice chats with the director of a Dutch researcher who wanted to compare Lidcombe with another treatment option - an episode that she has still not spoken publicly about. I wonder what would happen if she were to write an open-ed in a main Australian newspaper about this episode?

So as you see, we again need the Americans to police the world! Soft power of course. Australia deserves an opinion that opposes the opinion of the lords of the lands down under. A petition by Craig Coleman does exactly this:

Recently, Speech Pathology Australia (the national speech-language pathology association of Australia) submitted a proposal to the Australian Government Department of Treasury that would require Medicare rebates be made available for children who stutter, but only if they are treated using the Lidcombe Program. 

The ramifications for this action are significant. As expected, many speech-language pathologists from the U.S. and abroad do not support this action for several reasons. First, this action gravely limits the scope of treatment for stuttering. Many interventions for preschool stuttering have shown to be effective (Millard, Nicholas, & Cook, 2008; Yaruss, Coleman, & Hammer, 2006; Franken, Kielstra-Van der Schalk, & Boelens, 2005).

So what is my opinion?

To those obsessed by p-values

I have always looked with horror at the near religious and blind application of p-values in hundreds of stuttering research papers.

Here is a blog post discussing p-values:

The journal Basic and Applied Social Psychology has come out with a ban on p-values. To be precise, they've banned the “null hypothesis significance testing procedure” from articles published in the journal. This ban means that authors in the journal can’t claim that an effect they see in their data is “statistically significant” in the usual way that we’re all accustomed to reading.