Music Therapy

[cam]

Talk to me about music therapy for speech issues. My mom heard one anecdote of it helping a kid with very different speech issues than LO, and now she is pushing the topic. I was thinking it was one of those "therapies" that didn't have the research to support it, but perhaps I am thinking of another since there are so many similar sounding ones that are actually quite different. Any information, input, thoughts, etc you have would be appreciated. TIA!

[auntie]

cam,

My approach to this sort of "suggestion" is to charge the person making it with finding me some evidence based studies in refereed journals to read before I can seriously consider them. I have also been known to cite DS's psychologist or dev pedi as the expert in deciding which interventions we do in a kind of "thanks for thinking of us, we've got it covered".

There's not a whole lot out there about music therapy and language. One of my Eagle Scouts was hell-bent of restoring a piano as his service project and found and found a Autism Preschool to agree to be his beneficiary. He tried to sell it to me as the Eagle Coordinator as being therapeutic. I challenged him to find studies to back up his claims and he was unable to. He had to rewrite his proposal as an enhancement to their arts programming.

[cam]

Thanks, auntie. That is in line with what I had thought regarding the lack of scientific studies as evidence.