Did you know that sometimes a person whose ability to communicate can’t speak, but they can sing what they want to say? It’s true. We’d heard this and we checked it out with Eleanor Mirne, the speech and language pathologist who was featured on the March 10th Sterling Health Show. You can hear this show by going to www.sterlinghealth.com and clicking on the WGCH Radio Show link.
Think of the applications this can have for someone whose had a stoke or a traumatic brain injury and has become aphasic! Can you just imagine how frustrating it would be not to be able to express yourself verbally, or to understand anything someone was saying to you? I find it absolutely fascinating to think that some of these people might be able to get around this major challenge by singing, even if they were off key, and I wonder how many have tried this to see if it would work for them.
There are so many different reasons a person’s ability to communicate can become impaired or lost, and as many ways to work therapeutically with them. This condition, called aphasia, can mean an inability to verbalize speech, or the inability to comprehend what someone says to you, or a mixture of both. To learn more about aphasia check out this website: http://www.aphasia.org/. Sometimes speech imperfections are a small issue and at other times the pathology is very severe. We hear people every day who exhibit minor speech imperfections and we’ve undoubtedly heard people whose speech is so severely affected from a disease process that it’s difficult to understand them. We hope you know that you don’t need to be a patient in a hospital, nursing home or home care program to be helped by the services of a professional speech and language pathologist, the more accurate term for what many refer to as a speech therapist.
