2023 Volume 43 Issue 1 Pages 33-38
We investigated the current situation of melodic intonation therapy (MIT) in Japan. We sent the questionnaire to 3,136 institutes which were listed in the home page of Japanese Association of Speech-Language-Hearing Therapists on the 1st of May, 2021. The deadline of the reply was set 30th June, 2021. Except nine nonarrival mails by the unknown destinations, 3,127 mails were effectively delivered. We got the responses from 1,186 institutes (response rate : 37.9%) . Eighty-one percent of respondents had known the word of “MIT”, and, among them, eighty-five percent persons (800 speech therapists, STs) realized that the MIT is effective to the speech impairment of motor aphasia. But, only nine percent of them (90 STs) carried out the MIT in the clinical situations, and fifty-one percent (43 STs) did it based on the description of literatures. The utilization rate of the Japanese version of MIT (MIT-J) was 35% (29 STs) . Thirty-nine percent (458 STs) of total respondents wished to attend the practical lecture of MIT-J. Based on these findings, we can conclude as follows : first, most of the STs in Japan know the effectiveness of the MIT, but there are only a few institutes which carried out actually in the clinical situation. The reason of this dissociation was supposed to be caused by the difficulty of literal description about the key points of MIT performance. Second, more than a half such institutes perform the MIT depending on their understandings from the literatures, namely on their own methods. And third, we could ascertain that there is a certain number of STs which wished to attend the lecture of the MIT-J. In order to resolve these problems, we are going to establish a general incorporated association and the system of the lecture and the qualification of the MIT-J.
