Swallowing/Dysphagia Management

Swallowing/Dysphagia Management

line drawing of a person swallowing from side view

‘Dysphagia’ is a clinical term/diagnosis that refers to difficulty swallowing. You may have dysphagia for a variety of reasons, including: stroke/TBI, neurodegenerative conditions (ALS, PD, MS, Dementia), head/neck surgery, or muscle weakness caused by normal aging. Dysphagia can lead to ‘aspiration’ (food/drink going into your airway and/or lungs), which may result in lung infection/pneumonia.

Our Services

  • Having difficulty swallowing or find you’re coughing during / after meals? You might benefit from a clinical swallowing assessment.

    Your clinician will come to your home with an assessment kit, which will contain drinks and foods of different textures. Your clinician will assess your ability to swallow each texture and then make a ‘Safe Diet Texture Recommendation’. Based on the results of the assessment, your clinician may recommend an instrumental assessment.

  • Whether you’ve recently had an instrumental assessment and need help understanding the report/recommendations, or your clinician recommended an instrumental, we can help!

    Instrumental assessments are tests that allow SLPs to see what is happening in your mouth/throat when you eat. These tests are done in a hospital or outpatient clinic. If your clinician recommends an instrumental assessment, they will walk you through what to expect and help you with the referral process.

  • After you’ve had an intrumental assessment, the SLP that did your test may recommend a dysphagia therapy program. We can help you with your therapy exercises and answer any questions you have.

    Once you’ve completed your therapy program as recommended, you may need to have another instrumental assessment. This is so your SLP can see if/how much your swallowing has improved with the treatment, and make new diet texture recommendations if appropriate.

  • If your clinician has recommended modifying your diet texture in order to lower your risk of aspiration, you may need some help making these changes at home. We can provide you with education about which textures are safe for you and why certain textures may not be safe. We will also teach you how to modify liquids and foods to be the recommended texture. This may involve using a powdered thickener, such as “thicken-up”, which can be mixed into any type of drink or soup.

 FAQs

  • Good question! Coughing when eating or drinking can be a sign that food/drink is going into your airway. This is dangerous as the food/drink can get into your lungs and cause infection or pneumonia. If you frequently cough when you eat or drink you should see an SLP for a swallowing assessment as soon as possible.

  • It is best practice in the Speech-Language Pathology field to do an instrumental assessment when a client is experiencing difficulty swallowing. SLPs can get a lot of information from a clinical swallowing assessment, however, swallowing is a very complex process and many things can’t be judged form the outside. An instrumental assessment allows your SLP to see what is actually happening in your throat when you swallow and then recommend the safest diet for you.

  • In order to determine what therapy exercises will help improve your swallow, your SLP needs to identify what muscles and structures in your throat need to be targetted. This isn’t possible without an instrumental assessment as we can’t see many of these from the outside.

  • If your SLP recommended nectar-thick or honey-thick fluids, it’s because they determined that thin liquids (such as water, coffee/tea, pop, alcohol, and most juices) are unsafe. Thin liquids may be entering your airway when you drink, which puts you at risk of aspiration and developing infection/pneumonia.

  • There are many different brands and types of thickener. Powdered thickeners are the easiest to find and can be purchased online from stores like Amazon and Walmart. A popular brand is “Thicken-Up”.

    You can buy pre-thickened liquids from medical supply stores and some drug stores.