Reply to The ethics of price gauging special needs families

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I am a school psychologist and have a son with special needs. The research on so many types of therapies is really lacking.

When he was turning three and really needed speech therapy I really looked into the research. Ethically they can't take identical twins and give one twin speech therapy and the other twin is the control, which would be the best type of study to see if the twin who receives therapy ends up being better off.  The same with occupational therapy.

In my experience (which really isn't proof of anything, of course) when there is a specific targeted issue like an articulation disorder or producing sounds that can be measured pretty well then speech therapy seems to be effective.

If it is a language issue then working for 30 minutes or 60 minutes once a week really just doesn't seem to be effective. There are around 100 hours in a week that kids are awake. So that is really working on something intently 1% of the time. So you can take your child to speech therapy for language issues for years and continue to pay but how much is it really doing.

I think as a parent if I am spending money and time to get my chid therapy, then I am going to have a tendency to think that is what is making my child better over the course of time and not just they are developing as they get older.  So providers take advantage of this. [/quote]

I'm glad you brought this up and you have a unique perspective as both a parent and clinician. I looked at the research too and there's no way to know where kids would have been without the intervention, but I do find with cerrtain issues it's obvious the intervention helped. I didn't find in our experience a correlation between experience level or cost and ability get results. The OT who conquered shoe-lace tying was with the school system. The ST who got results with artic took our insurance and was in her second year or work. That was when we lived in an area where you could find STs who take insurance. I wasn't impressed with most high -fee providers and there were gimmicks like trying to lock us into a certain number of sessions. One provider kept contacting us after we dropped her offering free sessions if we referred friends to her.[/quote]

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