The Researcher is In

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Re: relapse in children

From: Tom Weidig (thestutteringbrain.blogspot.com)
Date: 19 Oct 2005
Time: 13:04:41 -0500
Remote Name: 84.138.168.152

Comments

It is possible to address this question in research, but it is technically difficult due to the natural recovery rate. For an individual case that you have treated, you cannot distinguish whether the child recovered due to your intervention or would have recovered anyway. So what you need to do is to look at a large sample. Let's assume the natural recovery rate is 80%. If you treat 100 children and 90 children recover, you still dont know whether your treatment helped an extra 10% or whether by chance all 90 children would have recovered naturally anyway. BUT the more recover above the natural rate and the bigger the sample, the lower the probability that you by chance have only children that would have recovered naturally. It is possible to calculate the probability but I spare you the exact statistical details. There is one article out in the British Medical Journal that has done something like this on Liddcombe treatment (but I think they got their statistics a bit wrong): "Randomised controlled trial of the Lidcombe programme of early stuttering intervention" by Jones, Onslow, Packman, Williams, Ormond, Schwarz, Gebski.


Last changed: 10/31/05