Speech therapy is a service that is easy to take for granted, but which is relevant in many settings. Speech is one of the basic things that a human being needs to use in order to have a better quality of life, and to communicate with each other with ease. Having a problem with speech can have a huge impact on one’s day to day life, including their ability to work. Fortunately, the field of speech therapy is rapidly expanding, and this means that more treatment centers and research facilities are now devoted to find out just how speech works and how to treat problems that arise from it.
A large number of people, however, are not sure about what speech therapy is and how it works. Some of the things you may not have known about it include:
It can be required by both adults and children
A common misconception is the fact that speech therapy is only useful for children who have some sort of developmental disorder that affects their speech, such as a cleft lip. However, this is not always the case. There are times when an adult who had normal speech before will actually need the service. Some of the conditions that make this necessary include:
• Motor neuron disease
• Alzheimer’s disease
• Dementia
• Huntington’s disease
• Multiple Sclerosis
• Traumatic brain injury
• Parkinson’s disease
All these diseases affect how the brain works. When the speech center is affected, they reduce an individual’s capacity to generate speech, making it necessary for them to go for therapy.
It normally has to be a multidisciplinary issue
Speech is very complex, and requires that many systems work together in order to make it work. For instance, the structures that are involved in speech generation such as your throat muscles need to be in good working order, as do your brain and all the nerves. This means that when there is a problem with speech, it could be attributed to a large number of systems, and sometimes more than one system may be involved.
This means that when getting speech therapy, a multidisciplinary approach using specialists from different cadres normally has to be used. This way, all the possible causes of the speech impediment will be identified and treated.
The standards change from time to time
There is a lot of ongoing research about speech and how it’s generated. For this reason, the protocols that are used in speech therapy may slightly change very few years due to new discoveries in the field. For this reason, people who need the service are often encouraged to get it from facilities that keep up with such changes to ensure that they get the most evidence-based treatment.
It does work
There are many people who are usually skeptical about speech therapy, thinking that it’s just a way for the medical community to make money. However, both research and personal reviews have shown that it actually works, and in most cases contributes to making an individual’s quality of life much better.
