I have since met quite a few others, some good friends, who experience the same problem, in a more general sense

You’ve both been cross-posted, word for word, at Same Difference with full links and credit. Thanks a lot! You’ve also been added to my blogroll and my Guest Contributors page.

Unity, you said you planned to respond to LFAT’s letter at MoT. I’m waiting to cross post that too, when it’s up.

If anyone else wants to contribute to the debate at Same Difference, cross-posting is automatic and comments are more than welcome.

Nitpicking, but no, that’s not how it works. The 600 are review articles (going back to 1964 if you look), and are included within the 6000. PubMed doesn’t either review articles itself or involve itself with the peer review process; it just indexes the entire contents of journals.

(This is also a dubious piece of evidence for anything – that there are 4000-odd results on homeopathy in PubMed doesn’t say anything in particular about anything other than the fact that research has been done on the subject. If dyslexia actually was conclusively found to be a myth tomorrow, there would still be 6000 hits for it.)

But I am nitpicking. Good article.

Dave, the study you linked to cited a single piece of research on grown men who showed different patterns of brain activation when confronted with language tasks. How much variation do you get on this task with other individuals with reading problems? Do normal readers always use one side of the brain? What use is looking at adult brain scans when their difficulties have been cemented through years of education of varying quality?

The study concluded that “left brain areas associated with phonetic decoding are ineffective” in those who apparently have dyslexia, which again suggests that the method of teaching is crucial and that synthetic phonics may help in a large number of cases, especially when taught from an early age.

But, more importantly than all of that, did you notice that (purely by coincidence) this single study supported the conclusions of an author who just happens to be peddling their book, educational materials, workshops and reading programme about how to educate children with dyslexia on the very same website, and that their programme just happened to fit very nicely with the findings of the single study that they cited?!?!?! Unlike you, I don’t make a habit of listening to researchers who clearly have vested financial interests in the findings that they publish.

SPLD dyslexia isn’t an excuse to be illiterate; it’s just harder to achieve certain processing skills than the average person. As with any cross section of society there are low ability, average and high ability people, this is no different for Dyslexia. The brain functions in a different way for dyslexics; this is shown in many studies of brain activity. Normal readers are found to use the left side of the brain in reading. By contrast, competent dyslexic readers use the right side of the brain; further to this, the more competent the dyslexic reader is, the less likely they are to use the left-hand side of the brain: “Dyslexics who read well consistently bypass the left temporal region.” (Abigail Marshall 2003). I’m dyslexic, but I am not illiterate. Having had a low reading age at primary school I received a 1st for my thesis and have had educational research papers published.

Interesting point, A one legged man who has a false limb is able to walk. Does this mean that the disability does not exist?

“Dyslexia is a myth invented by education chiefs to cover up poor teaching methods” Obviously a very old myth! Orton (1937) claimed that reversible letters (b/d. q/p) were literally perceived wrongly by dyslexic readers either through a lack of suppression of the mirror image, produced by the alternate hemisphere of the brain; or through misperception based on incomplete visual information being obtained from the stimulus. Or not quite as old: “Dyslexia an inability to read normally as a result of a dysfunction in the brain”. Myklebust and Johnson (1962)

Although individuals can learn to read, reading is never fully mastered by anyone. Definitions of what exactly dyslexia is have varied over the years, but there is a broad consensus that it is a phonological memory problem.

My belief is that public officials that think this kind of ignorant, tabloid nonsense is appropriate for public forum despite breaking the “Disability Discrimination Act” (1995) should not be in office. Mr. Stringers actions, by association, bring his party into disrepute and provide in my opinion strong grounds for his resignation.

Mr D Williams

Reference:
Marshall, A 2003 http://www.dyslexia.com/science/different_pathways.htm

Mykebust, HR and Johnson, DJ 1962 “Dyslexia in children” Exceptional Children, 29 14. In Naidoo, S 1972 “Specific dyslexia” Chap. 2 London: Pitman.

Orton, ST 1937 “Reading, writing and speech problems in children.” New York: Norton.

Reid, G 2003 Dyslexia A Practitioner’s Handbook Wiley p7

Singleton C 1999 : Dyslexia in Higher Education – Policy, Provision and Practice (Report of the National Working Party on Dyslexia in Higher Education). University of Hull.

The Rose Report 2006 into the teaching of early reading presented a genuine opportunity to eliminate illiteracy -children at last could have simple, logical and unambiguous instruction . But Gordon Brown introduced Reading Recovery for struggling children at around the same time. This much-discredited and hugely expensive programme is the antithesis of the Rose recommendations. The government refuses to address the issue, so what are teachers now expected to do?

Reading Recovery constitutes a significant part of the ‘gravy train’ that Graham Stringer referred to. He should be warmly congratulated for raising the issue, even if some of the detail of his argument lacked precision – but then the term ‘dyslexia’ also lacks precision.

1. By all means repost this piece at your own blog but be clear that it stands only a rebuttal of Stringer’s boneheaded remarks and not a comprehensive ‘take’ on the dyslexia hypothesis

2. LFAT’s response is a pleasant surprise in as much as raise the bar on this debate significantly, largely because LFAT does bring some genuine firepower to the debate.

(And BTW, LFAT, the note of caution I sounded in referring to my own academic background was purely to make the point that if all you were going to bring along was the Dispatches documentary and the press cuttings of Elliots’ comments then you were going to your arse comprehensively handed to you, in part because the media did its usually bang-up job of mangling Elliot’s arguments into near incoherence but also because his views too often tend to be bandied around on teh Internwebs by the usual bunch of half-arsed denialists who wouldn’t know what to make of a research paper if you recycled it into Andrex before handing it to them.

The fact that you also have credible academic background and know Elliot’s work well makes a hell of a difference as it means we can take this discussion up a few levels and really get into the meat, all of which makes a pleasant change from the usual bollocks that gets passed off as argument)

3. Bearing that comment in mind, I’m putting together a response to LFAT’s response, and if they’re agreeable and you’re interested to taking things up a few notches in terms of the depth of the issues then it may be worth reposting both responses, so your readers get to see both sides of the detailed argument. It’s not that LFAT doesn’t have a number of valid points here, but there are some significant points of dispute, and underlying reasons for those disputes, which deserve to aired but rarely get mentioned in public because they relate to internal ‘fissures’ within psychology itself.

As soon as I’ve sorted out my reponse, which I’ll post over the MoT because this debate is moving rapidly away from LibCon territory, I’ll drop a link in here and then we can all get into this.

If we medicalise something, it relieves us of the responsibility for causing the problem and in some cases dealing with problem as well. If a child is behaving like a rabid animal in the classroom and they get diagnosed with ADHD, it’s not the parents fault anymore. If a child can’t read or write and they get diagnosed with dyslexia, it’s not them education system’s fault anymore.

etc etc

But then it seems a condition of 20th now 21st century living to medicalise as many problems as possible.

Oh so you’re one of THOSE people – bury head in sand, ignore scientific evidence, etc. Read my post this morning then I’d be happy to discuss it further.

Unity, can I please cross-post this excellent essay to my blog, Same Difference? (My name links to it, in case you don’t remember.) I wanted to write about this there myself, but you’ve done a much better job. You and LC will get full credit, the original will be linked in the cross post and I’ll throw in a blogroll spot for Ministry of Truth. You’ll also be added to my ‘Guest Contributors’ page. With your permission, it will go up tomorrow night. Thanks!

Ah, so you did. My mistake.

That said, glib and unsupported claims of rent-seeking deserve to be dismissed out of hand

Too true. The comments made seem to have contributed nothing to an already happily raging debate.

Perhaps this could be the Tories compensating for not making any motion on the genuine middle class tool of “faith” (church/mosque/synagogue) schools? A rather ignoble fidget, if so.

Yes I admit I did miss that pithily expressed paragraph in all the excitement but you are not quite on the money. Enormous financial incentives driving ” medicalising certain traits and characteristics that are, in reality, well within the normal spectrum of human behaviour and intellectual performance.” are produced by the state . You would not believe the number of people employed to sit around discussing the implications of young Newmania throwing his plasticine ( dats my boy ). Neither perhaps are you aware of the animal cunning of the parent. As ever when you have needs based hand outs everyone gets needy (or nweedy )
As those of us who are economically dyslexic recognise ,thanks to the squanderer leaving the hose on for ten years we are approaching a period of tax rises and cuts to state spending . The public Sector has got to be slashed now or later and the question then arises what do we cut . It is not going to be sustainable to waste the colossal sums we are on fictitious conditions and the army of parasites they support. It is immoral now.
( Although I am happy to milk it while its there of course ). Incidentally the whole business of getting statemented is a lengthy bureaucratic one involving many letters evidence and so on. I am sure you can imagine how that works. You would be brilliant at it .

Evidence of over diagnosis is NOT proof that the condition doesn’t exist.

Proving that something does not exist is not easy is it , when you meet god ,( looking pretty damn silly ) you will probably want to thank him for making the fact of his non-existence so hard to establish .It can be harmful however to invent a condition that actually covers numerous effects . There used to be such a thing as a nervous breakdown which was assumed to have some reality. That assumption only stopped the development of what is pretty much the witch doctor branch of medicine anyway. How much suffering did the error cause . Most of the progress of medicine in the 19th century was not so much discovering new things as realising everything they thought before was rubbish . Questioning a convenient label is not necessarily an attack on sufferers . It can be exceedingly helpful and from what I understand may be so in this case

And, as I noted earlier this week in commenting on a media splurge relating to a piece of newly published research into autism, which turned out to be considerably less interesting that may have been suggested by the coverage it received, we also cannot say for certain whether or not we may be overshooting the mark in diagnosing these conditions and, to some unspecified extent, unnecessarily medicalising certain traits and characteristics that are, in reality, well within the normal spectrum of human behaviour and intellectual performance.

Evidence of over diagnosis is NOT proof that the condition doesn’t exist.