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From: Walt Manning
Date: 21 Oct 2008
Time: 16:35:47 -0500
Remote Name: 141.225.97.59
Hello Mark, I certainly don’t agree that prolonged speech is the treatment of choice. I don't believe that any one particular treatment qualifies as the "treatment of choice". I as well as others have spoken and written about on many occasions the idea that one form or brand of therapy is better than the others is silly. The question isn’t which treatment protocol is somehow the “best” by whatever definition but rather “what does this person who happens to stutter need from me now” (something Van Riper said may years ago). This issue has been argued in psychology and counseling for years and for good reasons the studies comparing the efficacy or effectiveness of various treatment approaches has been termed “horse race research”. Assuming a treatment protocol is empirically informed or possibly empirically validated (and few are in many fields), as long as the protocol contains the important common factors for facilitating therapeutic change it is a reasonable approach to take. Whether the approach corresponds to what a person may benefit from at a particular time is another question. And perhaps more important, as several researchers are finding, it may be more important to shop for an experienced and wise clinician than it is to shop for a particular treatment. There are a number of good references which address these issues and I’ll come back with some of them if you or others are interested.