Speech therapy, and much more, will be highlighted in May as Newman Regional Health recognizes national Better Speech and Hearing Month.
“They only think it’s for speech, and that’s a misnomer,” said Jenny Lewallen, one of Newman’s two speech-language pathologists. “It’s for a lot more than speech. I tell patients it’s neck-up.”
And “neck-up” takes in a multitude of functions that she and Krassina Young are certified and licensed to provide therapy to improve or restore.
Treatment includes cognitive therapies — thought processing, reasoning, memory, and organization, for example — and therapies for speech deficits such as articulation, stuttering, language disorders and voice therapy.
“And those are from pediatric to geriatric,” Lewallen said.
Young has been a speech pathologist for 20 years, with 4 of them at Newman Regional Health; Lewallen has 11 years of experience, with 2 at Newman.
Both women have the master’s degree required for the job, are certified nationally and licensed by the state of Kansas.
The women work with people who are experiencing difficulties in swallowing because of strokes, head injuries, Parkinson’s disease, infections, or the aging process.
“It’s a newer disorder,” Lewallen said, mentioning that 20 years ago, problems with swallowing were treated by occupational therapists.
Now, several new treatments are being used by speech-language pathologists.
VitalStim, the latest on the market, has been cleared for use by the Federal Drug Administration, Lewallen said. Both she and Young are certified to administer the treatment, which is based on using electrodes on the skin to stimulate the patient to swallow. It is useful for patients who have had strokes or other episodes or conditions that make swallowing difficult, such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.
The pathologists control the amount of electricity used by the electronics. The dose depends on “how high you turn it up and how deep it goes,” Lewallen said.
Young also uses frozen lemon-glycerine swabs to stimulate swallowing and encourage appropriate muscles to regain their previous abilities to execute swallowing.
Young said that through modified barium swallowing studies, using a mixture of foods laced with barium, pathologists also can see a patient’s reactions to different textures and types of food.
After assessments, Young said, they can “determine the most appropriate and safest diet.”
Most of the pathologists’ speech patients here are adults, with many of them suffering from the aftermath of strokes.
“We work with all areas of the brain — function and memory can be impaired by stroke,” Young said.
“The wrong word coming out, we get a lot,” Lewallen said. It’s a good sign, though, when patients have “error awareness” — knowing that they’ve said the wrong word even as they are unable to remember what the right word is.
“That’s better,” Lewallen said. “We like to see that in a patient. No one was perfect to begin with in this life in our world.”
Error awareness may signal a better prognosis as patients try to recover the speech and word use they have lost. Complete recovery often is not possible, though significant improvements often are a reasonable goal.
“Part of our therapy is educating the family on how to communicate,” Young said.
Both pathologists are certified to work with Alternative Augmentative Communication Devices, often computers or electronic devices that enable people to communicate after they have been rendered speechless.
“That speaks for the patient,” Young said.
Patients may type in information or, often, touch pictures on screens that linked together can make understandable sentences.
Memory improvement gets attention from the pathologists, too. They use exercises to help their patients try to reroute signals in the brain and teach strategies that can help improve functions, such as using appointment books, calendars, and other types of memory-joggers.
“Organizing an environment so you don’t have to remember where everything’s at,” Young explained.
Speech therapy can be had through most school systems, though most programs are not operated through the summer.
Young and Lewallen have treated the youngsters during the off-school times with one-on-one therapy.
“A lot of children are seen in the school system through the year,” Lewallen said. “Through their parents’ insurance, they could be seen in the summer.”
Lewallen and Young can work with certain patients soon after birth, for conditions such as cerebral palsy, Down Syndrome, autism and other disorders that cause speech difficulties.
Lewallen has seen speech problems from both sides.
“I actually had speech therapy for Rs and Ss when I was young,” she said. The experience may not have turned her immediately toward a career in speech-language pathology but she made her decision at an early age.
“Right when I went into college, I knew what I wanted to be,” Lewallen said. “... It’s a great profession.”