Truth?

I’m just getting around to reading the July 2019 issue of the ASHA Leader and there is a really interesting article that I’m loving about pseudoscience versus truth and how to defend scientific and evidence-based practices and our growing culture of social media. The article is titled “Does Truth have a Future” and it’s written by Nancy Volkers. The article is speaking to me a lot as a professional with regards to the populations that I serve as well as as a parent in regards to my own children and how I parent them and teach them to digest media and information.

It’s so important to remember that effective and evidence-based practices are usually never a quick fix. It’s especially important to defend science and the process of science. This is something that I think about it my parenting quite often and I find myself having more conversations with my older child about thinking things through and really questioning results that are found too easily. I find myself encouraging her to discuss that she is learning something versus she’s learned it as well as avoid using terms like I’ve mastered this or I’m an expert. This mentality of a continual learner versus someone who has mastered something is really important in the discussion of science versus pseudoscience.

It seems to me that many pseudoscience treatment procedures appear to not only dennounce scientific practices, they claimed to have found the answer. On the other hand, scientific evidence based practices are a continual spectrum of knowledge that slowly build upon each other. I remember when learning about research in college and graduate school we began to understand what a slow process research really is. This scientific process is essential to understanding how things work. I know I’ll always be open to new and evolving ideas as a professional and I’ll always be open to understanding new research. There’s never a one-size-fits-all solution. A career as a speech language pathologist is a commitment to endorsing the scientific process. We must make continual effort to fine-tune our skills in line with what research is indicating is appropriate.