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From: Woody
Date: 10/19/03
Time: 11:20:32 AM
Remote Name: 134.29.3.133
But here is my answer. We don't have a "technique." The therapy that we do to deal with both the behaviors and the thoughts/feelings of stuttering is a combination of many different approaches and methods. Some have been used by SLP's for many years. Others have been used by psychotherapists for even longer. A few we have developed ourselves, adapting psychotherapeutic strategies to the special needs of stutterers. We have been strongly influenced by our training in Gestalt psychotherapy. There are no methods available for working with stutterers that have been shown by good scientific research to be effective. There really is no way that scientific research can be used to demonstrate the efficacy of therapy, as far as we can see. Certainly, no one has done it yet. There have been some attempts, but there are very poor controls -- no controls for placebo effect, no controls for the stutterer's ability to avoid covertly, or to simply suppress the stuttering, no controls for the "demand characteristics" of the experiment that Adair has shown conclusively to be so powerful with human subjects.
In short, I don't think the efficacy of stuttering therapy is a subject for science. It is too personal, too individual, too unobservable, and too complex.
Woody