And the Hello and welcome to Serious Inquires only this is episode 457. I'm your host Thomas Smith and I've got such a great episode for you today.

My guest is Kelly Burke.

She's been on before.

She last told us I believe about Andrew Wakefield and yes, you know, you and I and probably everybody listening,

knew that he was full of shit.

But I, for one, didn't know just how full of shit he was in those studies and everything and

Kelly took us through that she was fantastic go check that episode out if you

didn't catch it but this time Kelly is telling us about something more directly within her experience or her work experience and expertise

and it's really fascinating. So once again I imagine a skeptical audience like you folks knows that facilitated communication is not a real thing.

It's not real, it's not actual, and it's very harmful and sad in many ways and we're going to talk about it.

But there's a lot about that that I didn't know.

There's also other rebrandings of it that I didn't know about that Kelly is going to tell us about and

Kelly is also going to tell us how this should actually work not facilitated

communication but how actually helping people who might be non-verbal or have other

reasons they can't communicate that way, finding ways to help them find their

quote-unquote voice in other ways.

It's really fascinating.

You know, Stephen Hawking is a very famous example,

but that's not exactly a typical case.

There are lots of other reasons that people might not be able to

communicate verbally or even using sign language or anything like that and there are ways that it can be done with the help of dedicated, persistent, and patient

professionals that aren't just turning them into human wegee boards and speaking for them.

...