The Proven Value of a Speech Pathologist
The speech pathologist role.
You came to get information that will help you make decisions for your loved one. Or, maybe you are here to get informed about your own health. In either case, I hope you’ll discover the value of a speech pathologist on your healthcare team. You may be wondering, how can a speech pathologist help adults and senior citizens? If so, you’re in the right place.
Do you now have trouble eating and drinking the foods and beverages that you once enjoyed? Are you trying to figure out how to modify your favorite foods to meet your current swallowing abilities? Maybe it has been a while since you were able to eat and you’re wondering if anything can be done. These are important questions that come up when living with dysphagia, a swallowing impairment. Dysphagia treatment is an area that a speech pathologist is trained to help you manage.
Now you may be asking yourself, “Don’t speech therapists help you speak?” Yes! Many people are aware that we provide speech therapy for children, but few know that we also provide speech therapy for adults and seniors. Beyond speaking, a speech pathologist helps you communicate well again by working on your language and voice skills too. Those are actually different skills, but we’ll save that topic for another day.
So we’ve covered how a speech therapist provides dysphagia treatment as well as speech therapy. Did you know that we are also educated on treatment techniques that improve your cognition? This means that if you struggle to focus during daily tasks, have a hard time remembering important information, or find it difficult to come up with solutions for problems encountered during the day– we have treatment approaches to address those concerns.
Let’s take a walk through what this may look like for a gentleman we’ll call John.
Meet “John,’ a middle aged man who is recovering from a stroke that affected the left side of his brain, and the right side of his body. He is getting outpatient speech therapy and is very motivated to meet his goals because his daughter will be getting married in a few months.
John hopes to:
-Go get his suit tailored to a perfect fit.
-Walk his daughter down the aisle.
-Give a toast at the reception dinner.
-Enjoy eating the same dinner and dessert with the rest of the wedding guests.
John’s speech therapy plan involves:
Aphasia therapy that improves his language. Why? So that he can communicate with the tailor himself, rather than have someone else do that for him.
Dysphagia treatment to retrain his swallowing skills. Why? So that his swallowing abilities are good enough to eat dinner in a timely fashion, without choking.
Cognitive retraining for a sharpened memory. Why? So that he can use memory strategies to remember wedding guests and participate in conversations with them.
If it wasn’t clear before, I hope that it is more clear to you now. You really need a team surrounding you during rehabilitation from a stroke, brain injury or other neurological injury. A speech pathologist can make a valuable contribution to your healthcare team for all of the above reasons. We are here to help you.
