I was trained at a time when medical care was not a commodity.
It was part art, part science, and not delivered in bits in
pieces but imparted with an eye to the whole patient. And I was
trained by a master of the art and the science and the whole
patient. Dr. Robert Ruben has spent his life studying the
effects of communication disorders on the lives of children who
have challenges to communicate because they could not hear or
they could not speak. He recently published an editorial about
language in the International Journal of Pediatric
Otorhinolaryngology, for which he has served as Editor-in-Chief
for more than a quarter of a century. What he said to the small
audience of physicians who care for children with these
disorders has great relevance to everyone, so I am going to do
my best to digest it for my audience. If you want to read the
entire piece, you can access it on line. He starts with, “A
defining characteristic of the human being is our highly
developed linguistic communication system.” Today, m