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Aleksandar CORDIC

THE PROBLEMS OF EARLY CLINICAL DEFECTOLOGICAL DIAGNOSTICS

Clinical defectological diagnostics, related to diagnostics of each individual's impairment of his cognitive and socializing abilities, has been applied in our country for a long time. Since it is a new area in the clinical defectological work and a new form of research in defectology, it poses a series of problems which have not been met so far. We shall to recognize some of  them in this paper and to aim at their solution.

This time we shall consider only the most prominent problems towards which we direct our interventions:

·         When does defectological diagnostics take part in diagnosis as treatment of impairments of the handicapped person? When does it function in the process of rehabilitation? For example, is working with a dyslexic child treatment or rehabilitation?

·         When does the early diagnostics reveal a problem arising from inappropriate intersection of different development courses, which can sometimes be solved without any particular treatment (early stuttering, various convulsions), and when does it reveal actual condition, such as oligophrenia or autism.  Thereby we ask ourselves if early stimulative treatment of oligophrenic children or children with early childhood psychosis is treatment or rehabilitation.

We tried to classify end explain the problems of diagnostics in the context of treatment and rehabilitation and to define the theoretical grounds for our standpoints.

We wanted to point out the unity of the process of any impairment of the handicapped person from early childhood to the end of his life. Treatment and rehabilitation should be a united process and follow the course of development of early disorders which sometimes end up as handicaps, and sometimes, thanks to the treatment, may end up in successful socialization, for example, persons with impaired hearing or sight.

We establish defectology as a complete theoretical standpoint and expert procedure which is parallel to and complementary with medicine. The only difference we find is that physicians and clinical psychologists insist on recovering to normal the diseased or impaired functions and structures, while defectology develops methods by which treatment continues even though medical techniques have finished their work. Medicine improves in saving lives and defectology in saving the quality of those saved lives.