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From: Ryan Pollard
Date: 18 Oct 2008
Time: 13:49:35 -0500
Remote Name: 70.57.41.136
Good to hear from you, Tim. Long time, no talk. There seems to be two sides to this issue. On the one hand, you’re absolutely right that including the word “cure” in any type of stuttering treatment advertisement is deceptive marketing, as there is no cure for stuttering in the sense that there is a cure for, say, polio. On the other hand, it makes perfect sense from a purely business perspective. Many laypeople will use those phases you mentioned or similar ones when searching the Web for information on stuttering. If you want people to find your webpage, regardless of what type of treatment you offer, you’ll probably use meta-tags corresponding to the (in this case, inaccurate) parlance used by your potential customers/clients. I’m personally more concerned with the information provided on the website once the potential customer/client clicks on the link. In that regard, the SpeechEasy site has come a long way since its inception. Although not quite as evenhanded as it could be, it now portrays the device in a much more balanced manner, using phrases like “help with your stuttering problem”, “reduce stuttering”, and “increase fluency” rather than promising an instant cure. They also advocate for combining ongoing stuttering therapy with the SpeechEasy, an approach we strongly support. As for independent distributors of the device, some of them still promise more than the device can deliver and unfortunately not much is being done to police such sites. However, I’m not very hopeful; the Web’s an enormous marketplace of ideas and products, most of them of dubious worth, and efforts to supervise content have historically been ineffective.