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From: Russ Hicks
Date: 03 Oct 2007
Time: 23:28:41 -0500
Remote Name: 71.123.180.215
Hello Susan, Thanks for reading my paper. You want to know what DIDN'T work, right? Ha, ha, ha! Not to make light of your question, but what I was taught back in the "olden days" - when dinosaurs roamed the earth - certainly increased my fluency, but ONLY on a temporary basis. Techniques like slow speech, easy onset, continuous phonation - the standard fluency enhancing techniques student SLPs are taught in school, really do work to temporarily increase fluency. But without attacking the entire problem, the whole iceberg of stuttering, the therapy is doomed to failure. (See my 2003 ISAD paper called 'The Iceberg Analogy of Stuttering' at http://www.mnsu.edu/comdis/isad6/papers/hicks6.html for more details of this.) ..... Stuttering is a LOT more than a simple fluency problem. You're going to learn a lot more about this in school. It involves LOTS of emotions and personal self-worth issues. And unless all those issues are addressed, the problem will come back again and again - each time worse than it was before. ..... I've said - only half joking - if you want an easy profession, become a rocket scientist. Only three laws - compliments of Isaac Newton - govern that profession. If you want a far more challenging profession, become a speech-language pathologist. There are a million laws that keep on changing. What works for one client won't work on the next client. You have my utmost respect for the profession you're studying for! It's challenging-to-the-max, but if you know what you're doing, you can affect the lives of a great many people for the better. ..... My very best to you, ..... Russ