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From: Greg Snyder
Date: 19 Oct 2006
Time: 19:50:03 -0500
Remote Name: 207.68.248.51
Hi Tiffany. You asked: [Has there been any research of brain scan identifying differences of people who stutter and people who do not stutter?] Yes. Loads. A brief lit review will easily give you a week’s worth of reading. And such reading is highly recommended. Spend a little time in the library or online and catch up. You also wrote: [Also, I don't think it is significant to question whether it is a speech disorder, rather how we can treat the behaviors and help people who stutter communicate effectively.] We’re going to have to agree to disagree on this one. And ultimately, the evidence is likely going to disagree with you too. If I have interpreted your statement correctly, you are essentially declaring that one can treat the pathology without knowing its etiology. Well, that’s only partially correct. One can certainly “treat” a disorder of unknown etiology, but with horrible to mediocre efficacy. They tried blood-letting for a while, but that didn’t work too well. Similarly, the use of leeches was a medical paradigm that turn out to be a panacea. We tried telling people with ulcers to “relax”, but that idea didn’t pan out either. That whole “body humors” thing didn’t exactly turn out to be a valid medical model. So trying to “treat the stuttering behavior” without knowing what the stuttering phenomenon actually represents is akin to trying to treat a fever by giving someone a cold shower or an ice bath. When a therapist limits an unknown pathology to a superficial behavior, then they need to expect limited and superficial results. We have been attempting to treat stuttered speech by dealing with the peripheral behavioral manifestations of the stuttering phenomenon for over 70 years, and without any significant improvement over that time. Conversely, the medical model has outpaced us in the areas of prevention, treatment and management by orders of magnitude. Why? Because the medical community followed the scientific method, while the SLP community followed our limited (blind) treatments of an errantly over-simplified pathology. As such, I have recently become an avid reader of 1930’s era stuttering research, and have seen that our roots were actually in true science. Where or why we took a wrong turn down the pseudoscientific path in which your question subscribes, I do not know. What I do know is that we cannot continue to keep the same perspective and continue the same treatments and expect different results. That, by definition, is insane. Subsequently, I suggest that it *is* significant to ask whether or not stuttering is a “speech disorder”, because it may help us view the pathology from an alternative perspective in which we have not previously considered. This extra-paradigmatic perspective may stimulate new treatment (and possibly better) treatment alternatives to the stuttering population.