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From: Seyhun Topbas
Date: 22 Oct 2008
Time: 08:09:56 -0500
Remote Name: 193.140.187.144
Dear all, First of all, I would like to thank to all the contributors for their interest, amazing questions and the appreciation for our Project. I am a bit late in answering your questions because of being out for a congress. Nevertheless, I am online today to catch up. It would be difficult to answer all the questions but let me give you some wording about our development in the profession. The SLP profession is outgoing independently from Audiology and Speech Pathology just as the reverse of the development in USA. That is, the Audiology and Speech Pathology profession have been founded by audiologists in 1982 with more emphasis on audiology. There is also another program as educational audiology, together with almost about 150 graduates until now. Thus, we (who graduated from England and USA as SLP’s) have founded the SLP as an independent department outgoing from the audiology (of course in collaboration with) only in 1999 and by initiating the MSc program in 2000, further doctorate degree in 2004. Thus far, we have graduated 54 masters degree students. So we altogether are about 200 people struggling to help those with speech-language disorders. Eventually, the shortage Aud & SLP’s in the field has led other professionals (special educators, psychologists, psychiatrists etc.) to take part in the field. They tried to help those PWS with what bacground they have about either stuttering or other SL disorders. As an example we can still find find those who think they can cure PWS with pills or medication. Of course this might be a worldwide problem. One can find a lot of information on stuttering through internet in Turkish. However, almost all of these information is driven by those who are other professionals and almost all of them are commercial. You can easily see an advertisement such as “ no more stuttering”, “stopping stuttering in 15 days”, “ultimate cure” etc. Thus, we were very enthusiastic in initiating this Project. Myself, my colleaques, our staff at DILKOM are all owe too much to Ken, Cheryl and Rae Jean who are involved in this Project for their efforts to supervise us during this process and to TUBITAK for granting this Project. The Project has two other sub-goals other than to establish the self-help via internet. To give individual therapy and to initiate group-therapy on a scientific basis. Thus we are also conducting an evidence based practice EBP-research to see the effectiveness of our therapies. So when the Project will be finished we will have be sharing our results nationally and internationally. Any other questions are welcome. Best regards and wishes to you all. Prof. Dr. Seyhun Topbas