MARQUETTE, Mich. (WZMQ) – May is Better Speech and Hearing month, which aims to raise awareness to speech and hearing problems, and how people live with them in their day to day lives.
According to the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, approximately 7% of Americans have a speech disorder, which is an impairment of the articulation of speech sounds, fluency, or voice.
UP Health Services Speech Language Pathologist, Tally Blanton says most of her patients suffer from the inability to communicate, chronic coughing, or difficulty swallowing. Explaining how these symptoms sometimes occur she said, “maybe after a stroke, and they have aphasia, which is a language disorder, being able to understand or express yourself in the way that you did pre stroke. Um, I’ll get people with dysphasia, which is a swallowing disorder. Sometimes that can happen after a stroke or because of a spinal surgery and sometimes it can be related to stress.
Blanton says treating each disorder can vary, because a treatment that works for one may not work for another and she added, “For voice, there’s exercises you can do, um, different types of voicing. So voicing, like with the voice, there’s resonance donation and respiration.
So, coordinating all those subsystems together to work like the most efficient way that they can given the deficit that they have.”
Regardless of what the ailment is, Blanton stresses the importance of seeking help and she said, “If you’ve recently, like, sustained a stroke, or if you’ve had a recent traumatic brain injury or something like that, sooner the better, because the brain oftentimes after a traumatic event, it starts to re map. And we kind of wanna go with the re mapping versus against the re mapping of the brain.”
The sooner that you seek help after noticing any changes in yourself or a loved one, the better, however it is never too late to see your primary doctor for a referral to consult a trained professional.
