For the 80 million people in the world who stammer, Lee Lovett has a solution.

It’s laid out in the pages of The Speech Professionals’ Guide to Helping Stutterers, a book the retired lawyer wrote with Marissa Brangman, a Bermudian speech-language pathologist, and Parth Bansal, a neurologist in India.

Both Mr Lovett and Dr Bansal are former stutterers. In 2016, Mr Lovett’s book, Stuttering and Anxiety Self-Cures: Become the Boss of Your Mind, drew a lot of attention. As a result he began offering one-on-one lessons to people around the world for free, and published a string of books on the subject.

The Speech Professionals’ Guide to Helping Stutterers promises to deliver “remarkable results” to anyone unable to speak without repeating sounds, syllables, words or phrases.

As described on Amazon.com, readers will gain access to “a revolutionary way to use neuroscience principles to enable stutterers to stop stuttering and learn to love to speak”.

According to Mr Lovett it’s long overdue.

“Those who have never humiliated themselves by being unable to speak have difficulty understanding the magnitude and crushing severity of it. Since only an estimated 1 per cent of the population suffers stuttering, understandably it seems unimportant to the other 99 per cent. However, 80 million people do matter,” he said.

“To this very day, the world’s medical community steadfastly and erroneously insists that stuttering is incurable and must be accepted. It’s not true, and we have posted hundreds of video cases online to prove it.”

MRIs of the brains of people who stutter show vivid “neurological connections among their neurons” that the medical community say is proof that the speech disorder is “genetic or organic and can't be cured”, Mr Lovett said.

He argues that what is happening instead, is that people make a mistake that is repeated until it becomes a habit. While most people begin stuttering between the ages of three and five, he has helped others who didn’t start until they were in their twenties.

“I would submit to you that the MRIs of stutterers before they stutter are just fine, but after they've had the habit and the pattern of blocking and repeating words and so forth, they create neuron connections that basically lock in the problem,” he said. “You've heard the expression ‘Use it or lose it’ – everything that we do is a function of habit. And if we don't continue a habit, we will eventually lose most or all of it.”

It’s a theory that Ms Brangman and Dr Bansal both bought into.

Mr Lovett met the speech pathologist at a workshop he gave a few years ago. She was thrilled to hear that the information she’d been taught – that stuttering could not be cured – was incorrect, and to see proof of it through the videos Mr Lovett had posted online.

Dr Bansal contacted Mr Lovett looking for help with his stuttering.

“We beat it rather quickly and he said, ‘You know, we ought to write some kind of a book for speech professionals, because they're the ones who keep preaching worldwide that stuttering is incurable and must be accepted and you and I know that that's not true.’

“I wrote an initial draft – it's not a long book, it's 150-something pages – and I sent it to them and they provided their inputs.”

The idea was to get the message across to an estimated 230,000 speech-language pathologists worldwide, that stuttering could be cured.

“They're still teaching in school that stuttering is incurable and must be accepted. That is wrong. We have certain steps and methods that would take me quite a while to explain that enable stutterers to stop stuttering,” Mr Lovett said.

“Once they stop stuttering it takes discipline on their part to continue not to stutter but if they continue our methods long enough – that may be a month, two months, three months, in some cases much longer – they will eventually overcome. They will replace the habit of stuttering with the same habit of fluency that you have and that I have.”

Although Mr Lovett stuttered “severely” in his teens and twenties, he was able to overcome it around the age of 30 with self-hypnosis learnt through a book by Melvin Powers, Practical Guide to Self-Hypnosis.

“Melvin Powers made a very simple presentation of how to hypnotise yourself and I studied it. I gave myself three treatments a day – before bed, when I got up in the morning, and once during the day.”

He combined this with techniques developed by twentieth century pharmacist and psychologist Émile Coué, who encouraged patients to repeat simple, optimistic phrases.

“He said he never healed anybody but his clients, they claimed that he healed hundreds of people. He had a system of affirmations – you might call it self-talk, but it can't be that simple. I did a blend of Émile Coué’s methodology and self-hypnosis, and that was the foundation of what we call the neuroscience method, which we trademarked in the US,” Mr Lovett said.

The method teaches people how to avoid “a humiliating speech incident” – a moment when stuttering is so severe it causes deep embarrassment.

“We tell stutterers, ‘No one is perfect. No one’s speech is. You've got to accept minor mistakes. When you make a few minor mistakes and force a word or do too many repeats, if you don't reach the level of humiliating yourself, you’ve got to forget it,’” the former stutterer said.

“I learnt to forget it. And after a while, I didn't have to forget it because I didn't do it.”

Repeating ten affirmations proposed by Émile Coué 20 times a day proved effective. Although he no longer relies on them for his speech, Mr Lovett continues the practice to help manage anger, anxiety, and other challenges people encounter in daily life

“It doesn’t make me perfect. It doesn’t make me a saint. It doesn’t do any of those things. But what it does do is it makes me a much better and a much happier person, I can assure you of that.”

He has spent more than 10,000 hours helping people stop stuttering, at no charge.

“We're trying to get this message out there that stuttering [can be beat]. That's my purpose. I keep writing these books, I work seven days a week, I almost never leave my desk. I'm not a martyr, I'm not a saint or anything like that, I just can't stand stuttering and I understand it intimately. I see no reason for it and I will continue to fight it as long as I can breathe.”

• The Speech Professionals’ Guide to Helping Stutterers is available onAmazon.com