Editor’s Note: Quick Answers
After more than 40 years of being a clinical audiologist, I think that I can answer almost all questions about audiology. Well,… not all questions. Occasionally, I second guess myself or just realize that I don’t know everything after all!
This issue of CanadianAudiologist.ca is totally dedicated to over 20 Quick Answers that help to fill in our clinical gaps. Quick Answers are short (400-600 word), several paragraph answers to commonly asked (or wondered about) questions that may come up in the clinic. These questions range from basic science such as why does the SNR get better (and not worse) as a speech signal progresses afferently towards various cortical structures, to whether the parents of a normal hearing speech/language delayed child in a bilingual household should be encouraged to only speak one language.
My intuition was that Quick Answers would be of more use for students and early career audiologists, but as I read through the Quick Answers that were submitted, I (quickly) changed my mind- they can be useful for anyone in our field regardless of how much (gray) hair (or hair…) they may have.
In fact, just questioning why we do things in the way that we do them may be based on long-forgotten assumptions, or on experimental results from the 1950s that may have slipped our mind, and this can be very fruitful- taking the clinician from a state of merely doing something to a state of understanding something.
In the next while, the Canadian Academy of Audiology website (www.CanadianAudiology.ca) will have a new section in their members-only portion of frequently updated Quick Answers. Members of the CAA and students are encouraged to log-on to the website to check for new Quick Answers as they become available on a regular basis… we will start with the 22 Quick Answers in this issue.