Are you a technician? A psychometrician?

(Blogger ' s note: I was unabashedly a fan of MAD magazine parodies when much younger, and still admire them for what they taught me about truth-telling.  Here's the truthiness I see in how an SLP structures her/his job.)

To the tune of "Take Me Out to the Ballgame"

Are you just a technician?
Do you do one job o'er and o'er??
Even if your one job is in demand
The pent-up boredom splits you where you stand:
Where a half of you works your butt off,
And the other half ' s going numb -
I'd much rather get techie, when all in one piece
So find your butt,  and insert thumb!

(To the technicians everywhere who really love their job: when you are mindful about your work, even a repetitive SLP activity is rewarding. Sometimes, though, it's hard to be mindful. Doing all day 'bedside swallows', hearing testing, oral peripherals, MBS's, and back in my training days, "IT- PAHS" (Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities"; - it was a pivotal life lesson to learn how to appreciate the discipline involved in doing repetitive tasks. Pinning your ears back, staying attuned to the needs for high quality in repetition, and keeping the ideals of quality customer service up front - equally important. But maybe, when you hear yourself referred to by physicians as "the swallow technician" - that actually happened - you want to use more of your skills acquired in graduate training. Why, otherwise, would a physician use your services for much more than the finite job )

To the tune of "La Bamba"

You are a psychometrician!
Your day is filled up with
Testing people from dawn to dusk
If there's a protocol to be had
You'll pull it off the shelf,
You'll glean it from its husk
And when it's time to know the score, they ask -
What is the score?
That is the score!?
YOU know the score....

(I do admire the skill of a professional tester: such an armamentaria for truth - telling in those test kits! Training and experience allow the psychometrician to capture systematically a portrait of a person's function. The pressures of the modern human service workplace, be it education or health care, - be it for adults or children - seem to benefit the services of this "psycho - ", as standardized data collection appears the favored documentation of outcomes, by third party payers. Inevitably, though, management of the person's case teaches you that understanding a person's needs cannot simply be -  placing a frame about a photograph.)

What else can be done? Is there another approach to patient care that allows an SLP to consider multiple dimensions; that allows you to apply the art of communication,  as well as the science?