What is speech therapy?
Logophoniatrics is the medical branch that focuses on the study, diagnosis and treatment of diseases that affect the patient’s ability to communicate both at the hearing level and the ability to speak. The objective of speech therapy is to rehabilitate and recover all those problems in communication, language, swallowing, speech and voice.
The phoniatrics and speech therapist is in charge of carrying out the physiological diagnosis of the variations and alterations of speech, hearing and swallowing.
Phoniatrics is linked to Otorhinolaryngology, and speech therapy is studied in Psychology. Speech therapy would be the combination of the work between speech therapists and otolaryngologists in the study of language.
What diseases does speech therapy treat?
There are many pathologies that have their origin in secondary hearing, swallowing and speech disorders. There are many pathologies that can be performed by a speech therapist.
Voice pathologies
- Dyslalia: problems or difficulties in articulating words. It is usually caused by a congenital malformation affecting the structures and organs that generate voice.
- Dysphasia: common in patients with brain injuries. Dysphasia is a difficulty in controlling words.
- Dysglossia: caused by functional alterations or anatomical malformations in the structures that modulate the voice. It consists of difficulty in articulating words correctly.
- Aphonia: aphonia is the loss – either partial or total – of the voice.
- Aphasia: it is caused by a brain lesion that prevents the sufferer from communicating.
- Dysatria: consists of difficulty in articulating words and sounds. It is caused by a nerve blockage or paralysis of the organs that produce it.
- Stuttering: it is a speech disorder that consists in the repetition of syllables or in the interruption of words.
Speech therapy treats several pathologies
Swallowing pathologies
- Dysphagia: consists of the inability or difficulty in swallowing.
- Atypical swallowing: consists of the impossibility to swallow that originates when the muscular movements involved in the swallowing process cannot be coordinated.
Hearing pathologies
- Presbycusis: is the progressive loss of people’s ability to hear and pick up high-frequency sounds due to deterioration in the nervous centers of the auditory system.
- Hypoacusis: consists of the partial loss of the ability to hear. Its causes and origins are multiple.
What are the subspecialties within speech therapy?
Within speech therapy, a group of several subspecialties could be studied. On the one hand, there are the pathologies or voice disorders, which include dysphonia problems -either functional, psychogenic or organic- and vocal mute. Speech or articulation pathology includes speech delays, dysglossia, dysatria, stuttering, or apraxia.
There is also developmental language pathology, which includes disorders such as dyslalia or dysphagia, speech language delays and disorders such as aphasia. At the level of written language there is dyslexia.
We should also mention hearing disorders or pathologies, among which are hypoacusis and presbycusis, and finally swallowing disorders.
When is it necessary to see a speech therapist?
A speech-language pathologist should be consulted when any of the following symptoms are suspected or suffered:
- In the person there are signs or problems that their evolutionary development at the level of speech, language, hearing or voice fails.
- There are problems in speech, for example not pronouncing all phonemes, i.e. dyslalia; if there are organic malformations causing dysglossia, if there are problems of fluency when speaking such as stuttering or if there is an alteration in the control of speech mechanisms.
- The person has difficulty acquiring oral language, both in expression, use and comprehension.
- The patient has difficulties in reading and writing.
- Problems in the voice, both with a partial or total disappearance, that is to say, aphonia; or by a transformation or a decrease of the tone, that is to say, dysphonia.
- The patient has problems in the language once he has already acquired it. Some examples would be aphasia, or dementias such as Alzheimer’s disease.
- The patient is suspected of having a hearing disorder, either hearing loss or deafness.