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From: Vasu Parameswaran
Date: 14 Oct 2004
Time: 21:49:09 -0500
Remote Name: 138.88.134.211
It seems to me that a very important question is efficacy measurement of therapies. While science demands quantifiable outcomes, I think that it is naive and misleading to rely on the percentage of disfluencies as a reliable measure of outcomes. There are a lot of criteria for success which unfortunately do not lend themselves to easy measurement - e.g. fear of speaking, word-substitutions, quality of life determined by the number and kind of activities that the stutterer participates in, and even basic things like eye-contact. But progress in each one of these criteria is vital for recovery. Is there any real research into devising a set of metrics that can be applied across a range of therapies to compare their efficacies?