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From: John B. Ellis
Date: 03 Oct 2005
Time: 16:53:59 -0500
Remote Name: 128.138.218.19
Bob, I appreciate your thoughts regarding Evidence-Based Practice. Although I understand your call for greater empathy, doesn't the current definition of EBP (as defined by Sackett et al., 2000 & ASHA) already include this? That is, doesn't a clinician who genuinely takes the values and preferences of her client into consideration during the clinical decision-making process by necessity display an empathic touch? She would have to demonstrate empathy--and other valuable skills and attributes--to accurately collect such information, wouldn't she? Then, in conjuction with her own past clincial experience with other clients, as well as the current state of peer-reviewed clinical research, she would make the best decision possible for that individual client. This current, three-pronged EBP model virtually guarantees that the subsequent therapy is highly individualized, both in execution and in outcome. So, it may not be so much a question of "EBP needs empathy" but more an issue of why some clinicians apparently persist in employing restrictive & seminal conceptualizations of EBP (i.e., EBP = research only). Perhaps such truncated versions of EBP fit their own theoretical predilictions. Furthermore, the history of stuttering therapy has been immeasurably impacted by clinicians & researchers who stuttered (e.g., Bluemel, Johnson, Van Riper, Sheehan, etc.), so it could be argued that stuttering has a deeper underlying reservoir of clinical empathy relative to most other areas of speech-language pathology.