Speech Therapy
When your ability to speak, swallow, or effectively communicate with others is compromised, your quality of life diminishes as well. Our Speech-Language Therapy program at FCH aims to restore your ability to communicate and facilitates a swift return to normal activity.
What Is Speech Therapy?
Speech therapy is a specialized form of treatment provided by our ASHA (American Speech and Hearing Association) licensed speech-language pathologist that specializes in the development and disorders of human communication.
Speech Therapy is for children and adults whose oral motor, swallowing, cognitive-linguistic, speech, or language skills have been affected by developmental delay, a neurological event/disease, head/neck cancer, or possibly debilitation related to an underlying medical disease process. Speech-Language Pathologists develop an individualized plan of care, tailored to each patient’s needs. They evaluate swallowing ability and make recommendations to alter nutritional methods or modify diets based upon aspiration (choking) risk.
They are part of a multidisciplinary team that works to restore functional communication and swallowing skills. SLPs may provide treatment techniques that include neuromuscular re-education of voice and swallowing muscles, activities to adjunct communication ability, and cognitive language techniques to restore or adapt communication skills and understanding of language.
Speech Disorders We Treat
We can diagnose and treat a wide variety of communication and swallowing disorders including:
· Articulation and phonology
· Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) (i.e. all of the ways that someone communicates besides talking)
· Auditory Processing Disorders (i.e. difficulty understanding sounds, including spoken words)
· Apraxia (i.e. motor speech disorder that makes it hard to speak)
· Aphasia (i.e. damage to the brain causing difficulty talking, reading writing and understanding written or spoken language)
· Expressive and Receptive Language Disorders (i.e. difficulty understanding what others are saying to them (receptive language), finding the right words to express themselves (expressive language)
· Fluency Disorders (i.e. stuttering)
· Feeding and Swallowing Disorders
· Pragmatic Language Disorders
· Voice and Resonance Disorders (Voice disorders impact the sound, pitch, and volume of your voice)
We work with patients who suffer from chronic diseases or who have experienced trauma. Medical conditions that may warrant speech therapy services include but are not limited to the following:
· Stroke
· Dementia
· Brain Tumor
· Post Covid-19 “brain fog” or cognitive changes
· Alzheimer’s disease
· Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI)
- Parkinson’s disease (PD)
