Smart Speech Therapy LLC

08/20/2025

Yet another amazing graduate SLP student "flew the coop"!

08/19/2025

✨ Looking for clear, evidence-based frameworks to guide your work? ✨

Detailed developmental frameworks for reading, writing, spelling, expressive language, and more are posted in the SLPs for Evidence Based Practice. These blueprints break complex skills into practical, teachable steps you can use for assessment, goal-setting, and intervention.

Want access? Join our community here: SLPs for Evidence Based Practice group to download!

💡 When the path is mapped, growth becomes possible!

08/11/2025

When Followers Do the Selling: Spotting Social Media Comments That Push Pseudoscience

For early-career SLPs (and anyone else who needs it), a guide to spotting the groupthink and empty comments that keep weak, unproven practices alive.

Pseudoscience in our field doesn’t just spread because of what is being sold and marketed well. It spreads because of the loyal followers who turn themselves into an unpaid sales force. They’re the hype squad, the echo chamber, the reason bad ideas travel farther than good ones.

Here’s how it usually plays out.

Someone asks an honest, reasonable question about a trendy but questionable practice: GLP, S2C, OFM, TOT overdiagnosis, SI, Vizualizing and Verbalizing, Listening Programs, Primitive Reflex Integration, etc., or whatever the current pseudoscience flavor of the month/year happens to be.

They’re looking for real discussion, credible sources, and a better understanding of what’s being offered.

Instead, the first wave of comments rolls in:

“Follow this Instagram account, he/she/they are amazing!”
“Take this course, it completely changed my practice!”
“Join this cohort, you’ll never do therapy the same way again.”
“Sign up for this paid study group, you’ll learn so much!”
“DM me, I’ll tell you all about it.”
“You have to go to this _____ workshop, it’s a game changer.”
“Join this Facebook group; they have all the references.”

So what’s missing? For starters, a critical examination of the claims, credible peer-reviewed research instead of weak or low-quality studies, and acknowledgment of limitations and serious gaps in the evidence, gaps that may lead to wasted therapy time, unnecessary expense for families, false hope, delayed access to proven interventions, or even unnecessary medical procedures such as surgery.

When these methods are applied to clients on your caseload, the cost isn’t just financial; it can mean missed developmental windows and poorer long-term outcomes.

It’s all marketing, no substance, and it’s coming from the cheer squad, not the original seller.

Push for evidence (or state that there's no evidence), and the tone shifts instantly:

Accusations of hostility: “You’re being aggressive,” “You’re attacking people,” “This feels like bullying,” or “You’re tearing down others instead of building them up.” The goal is to make the questioner feel like the bad guy for asking a reasonable question.

Deflections: “Buyers can figure it out themselves,” “We’re all adults here,” “Do your own research,” or “If it doesn’t work for you, just move on.” These comments shift the burden entirely to the buyer while dodging the question about whether the method even works.

Permission-slips for bad practice: “Sellers can sell what they want, it’s the buyer’s responsibility,” “Everyone’s entitled to share what’s worked for them,” “There’s room for all approaches,” or “If it helps just one client, it’s worth it.” These statements normalize weak or harmful practices by framing them as harmless personal choices.

False balance: “There’s evidence on both sides,” “We have to respect all perspectives,” or “Science doesn’t have all the answers yet.” This creates the illusion of legitimate debate where none exists.

Misdirection: Instead of addressing the question, the conversation pivots to an unrelated issue (“Why are you so worried about this when there are bigger problems in the field?”).

Appeals to authority without substance: “This was recommended by one of the leading experts in ...” “Clinics who use this approach have huge waitlists,” or “This presenter has been an SLP for over 30 years, they know what's up!” The name-dropping makes it sound credible, but there’s still no actual evidence behind the claim. These comments rely on reputation instead of data.

These aren’t reasonable and logical arguments. They’re group-think reflexes, designed to protect the in-group, not the evidence. They work because they shut down scrutiny, make the critic look unreasonable, and keep the marketing pipeline open.

Pay attention to these patterns. The danger isn’t just in the flashy ads or the “transformative” course titles. It’s in the crowd that rushes in to defend them without ever addressing the question.

When you see instant recommendations with no depth, no citations, and no acknowledgment of limitations, you’re not watching a professional conversation. You’re watching unpaid marketing.

And here’s the bottom line: the more we confuse popularity with actual evidence, the faster we hand over our field to whoever has the loudest fan club.

08/07/2025

Why Smart SLPs Fall for Pseudoscience: When Good Intentions Meet Weak Evidence

If we critically examine why pseudoscientific ideas gain traction, it often comes down to familiarity and emotional appeal.

These approaches tend to align with personal experiences, intuitive reasoning, and the understandable desire to see progress, particularly in situations where evidence is limited or change takes a very long time. In these situations, perceived effectiveness overrides interventions grounded in solid research and logic.

When one is facing a complex client, limited resources, and the pressure to do something, the appeal of a simple, intuitive framework is overwhelming. Especially one that promises natural progress, bypasses the gatekeepers and gives you a built-in community of believers. Add a dose of emotional storytelling and a few self-reinforcing anecdotes, and suddenly, questioning the method feels like betraying the child, not protecting them.

This is how movements grow without data. They offer identity, 'certainty', and a sense of control in a field that often demands comfort with complexity, nuance, and unanswered questions. And when scientific pushback arrives, no matter how valid, it gets reframed as ivory-tower elitism, jealousy, or fearmongering.
Clinical skepticism is labeled as gatekeeping. The absence of evidence becomes someone else’s bias or failure to “understand.” Defensiveness, ad hominem attacks, and accusations of being unreasonable then follow.

The result is a growing divide between what feels true and what is actually effective. This isn’t just a harmless disconnect between theory and practice. It puts our clinical judgment and our clients’ outcomes at risk.

If we’re trying to bridge the research-to-practice gap, we need to stop treating gut feelings and vague impressions as data and start questioning the marketing, the emotional appeals, anecdotal claims, social pressure, and the lack of oversight behind what we’re being asked to trust.

Because if we don’t, we’re not just opening the door, we’re handing over the keys, stepping aside, and letting pseudoscience drive the future of our field.

08/05/2025

Secretive special education settlements are costing school districts millions. Parents say districts aren’t fixing their programs.

https://www.inquirer.com/education/special-education-programs-philadelphia-region-deficiencies-due-process-settlements-20250805.html

The Reading League PA Decoding Dyslexia-MA Decoding Dyslexia - TX Decoding Dyslexia Decoding Dyslexia-IA Decoding Dyslexia Oregon Decoding Dyslexia - NJ Dyslexia Inspired

PM for a full read if you can't get access!

Lawyers say affluent parents who can afford to hire them, and who are dissatisfied with their child's IEP, are more likely to sue a school district than poor parents.

08/03/2025

NEW POST: Selling Out Speech Pathology: How Profit-Driven Programs, Costly Certifications, and Low-Evidence Fads Are Undermining Evidence-Based Practice

While our field promotes EBP, clinical choices are increasingly shaped by financial pressures and market trends. Costly certifications, trademarked programs, and influencer-endorsed methods with minimal empirical support are being treated as clinical gold standards, while accessible, research-backed interventions are sidelined. Meanwhile, many schools continue to rely on outdated, low-sensitivity assessments, often because those are the tools already available or familiar, not necessarily because they provide the most accurate picture of a student’s needs. This can unintentionally result in under-identification and limited access to services.

This article raises a question: If we’re truly a science-based profession, why is access to quality intervention determined by money, branding, or district policy?

It’s time to recommit to clinical integrity and stop confusing marketing with evidence.

https://tatyanaelleseff.com/selling-out-speech-pathology/

08/03/2025

NEW Post: Invisible Disability, Visible Damage: The Systemic Failure to Identify Language Disorders

Too many students with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and language-based learning challenges are misdiagnosed, overlooked, or underserved because neuropsychological and psychological evaluations fail to capture the complexity of language in real academic settings. Despite clear signs of struggle, students are routinely passed over due to average IQ scores, inflated grades, or generic test results that don’t assess discourse, pragmatics, or academic language. Misinterpretations lead to wrong interventions, like phonics-heavy programs or ADHD labels, when the root problem is language. This post exposes how outdated frameworks, poor test selection, and a lack of collaboration between neuropsychologists, psychologists and SLPs keep students from getting the help they need, and calls for an urgent shift toward interdisciplinary, language-focused assessment.

As a speech-language pathologist specializing in language and literacy assessment, I’ve reviewed hundreds of educational, psychoeducational and neuropsychological evaluations for students with complex learning needs. I repeatedly see students who are clearly struggling in the classroom, despite st...

07/20/2025

NEW POST: "Orton-Gillingham (OG) Alone Won’t Cut It: What the Research Actually Shows About Helping Struggling Readers"

Orton-Gillingham (OG) is often treated as the gold standard for dyslexia, but research doesn’t support it as a stand-alone solution. Time and time again, research studies find that OG-based interventions produced only small, statistically insignificant gains in word reading, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension (Stevens et al., 2021), and they do not address core oral language deficits like syntax, discourse, and inferencing—skills essential for students with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and mixed reading profiles (Snowling & Hulme, 2025). Despite this, many states now mandate OG-based instruction, forcing schools and teachers to adopt branded programs that vary widely in content and fidelity. The result: critical language needs are overlooked, while schools invest in programs that don’t deliver comprehensive literacy outcomes.

Effective intervention must go beyond phonics to include vocabulary, grammar, discourse, writing, pragmatics, and comprehension: components OG alone doesn’t adequately cover.

When it comes to reading intervention, few programs are as widely known, or as hotly debated, as the Orton-Gillingham (OG) approach. Marketed as a lifeline for children with dyslexia and word-level reading disabilities (WLRD), OG is often touted as the gold standard. But is it? A closer look at the....

07/18/2025

NEW POST: Selling Out Speech Pathology: How Profit-Driven Programs, Costly Certifications, and Low-Evidence Fads Are Undermining Evidence-Based Practice

While our field promotes EBP, clinical choices are increasingly shaped by financial pressures and market trends. Costly certifications, trademarked programs, and influencer-endorsed methods with minimal empirical support are being treated as clinical gold standards, while accessible, research-backed interventions are sidelined. Meanwhile, many schools continue to rely on outdated, low-sensitivity assessments, often because those are the tools already available or familiar, not necessarily because they provide the most accurate picture of a student’s needs. This can unintentionally result in under-identification and limited access to services.

This article raises a question: If we’re truly a science-based profession, why is access to quality intervention determined by money, branding, or district policy?

It’s time to recommit to clinical integrity and stop confusing marketing with evidence.

Speech-language pathologists claim to be a science-driven profession that follows the evidence. We cite evidence-based practice in our values, policies, and professional rhetoric. But in day-to-day reality, clinical decisions are often shaped less by research and more by revenue. The uncomfortable t...

07/11/2025

Risk Factors for Dyslexia: Addressing Oral Language Deficits

This article outlines the critical role of oral language deficits as risk factors for dyslexia, arguing that dyslexia is not solely a phonological disorder but often emerges from broader language weaknesses, especially when they persist to school entry. It synthesizes longitudinal and intervention research to demonstrate how early oral language abilities shape reading development and provides a rationale for systematic early language screening and intervention.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/mbe.70009?af=R

07/10/2025

When the Wrong Professional Evaluates the Child: The High Cost of Misdirected Assessments

Too many struggling students are sent for evaluations that lead nowhere, because the wrong professional is doing the assessment. Diagnosticians who don’t treat language disorders often miss the core issues, like deficits in syntax, verbal reasoning, or discourse comprehension, and instead churn out vague labels with no roadmap for therapy. Families are left with conflicting opinions, generic programs, and wasted time. Meanwhile, kids fall further behind. An EBP evaluation must connect directly to treatment, identifying specific language targets and guiding evidence-based intervention. If the assessor doesn’t understand or treat language, the results won’t help your child. And when you lose critical intervention time, you don’t just stall progress, you derail it.

In schools and private practices across the country, families of struggling students are told, “Get an evaluation,” as if simply identifying a diagnosis is the solution. But what happens when the evaluation is conducted by the wrong person, someone who either lacks deep expertise in language dev...

06/30/2025

My new article from the DLD and Me website is written especially for adults with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and the professionals who support them. It explores how therapy can help adults with DLD build stronger communication, confidence, and quality of life. It’s free to read and easy to share.

https://www.dldandme.org/all-articles/thriving-with-dld-how-therapy-helps-adults-build-a-better-life

Feel free to share widely!

Tatyana Elleseff, MA, CCC-SLP