There are some people who by misfortune or accident of birth have physical problems that impede their ability to speak normally, as well as perform other functions of the mouth that most people take for granted, like swallowing. Conditions such as these can be not just debilitating, but extremely frustrating when attempting to lead a normal life. Fortunately, there is help available!
There are highly trained medical professionals who specialize in helping people with these problems lead a more productive life. If this sounds good you might be interested in it as a career choice, speech pathology jobs are available once you have acquired the appropriate training, and people already working in this growing section of the health industry will be the first to tell you they need more help, as there is a surprising amount of demand for their caring services.
Let’s now take a closer look at what a speech pathologist does:
Speech pathologists have a large number of tasks they perform. They are trained to identify and evaluate communication or swallowing disabilities, diagnose any underlying conditions that may be the cause of them, then develop a personalized treatment plan that includes speech and swallowing therapy, and keep track of their patient’s progress. There is a broad range of therapies they perform because there are a great many different disorders that fall under their expertise. Some of these include:
- Testing and identifying young children with potential speech or swallowing problems.
- Teaching people with speech difficulties how to speak more clearly and easily.
- Helping people learn to form sounds.
- Help people strengthen the muscles used to speak and swallow through special exercises.
- Helping people increase the vocabulary of words they can pronounce clearly and/or understand.
- Provide methods that can improve the patient’s ability to string words together to form sentences.
- Teach augmentative and alternative communication systems to patients who suffer from severe. language disorders
- Educate patients as well as their families on positive ways to overcome the challenges that result from communication or swallowing disorders.
- Perform a treatment called aural rehabilitation, that assists patients with hearing loss in improving their quality of life.
Let’s now list the problem areas troubling patients that speech pathologists can help with:
- Speech Sounds – The way we pronounce sounds and put them into words.
- Language – Our ability to comprehend the words we read or hear, and our ability to communicate with others.
- Literacy – Our ability to read and write.
- Social Communication – How we listen to others and follow social rules.
- Voice – The way our voices sound. Some patients have trouble making sounds, talk too loudly, or talk through their noses.
- Fluency – More commonly known as stuttering, these are interruptions and disruptions in the flow of speech.
- Feeding and Swallowing – Some patients experience great difficulty when sucking, chewing, and swallowing foods and liquids.
The Australian Department of Health has further information on this subject for those interested. If helping people lead a normal, healthy life is something you would like to do, then we encourage you to become a speech pathologist!
