Too many symptoms

I have a question – more like guidance…

I just started seeing an eight-year-old who has different issues with her mouth:

1). Interdental lisp

2) Jaw slide when chewing

3) swallowing with tongue between teeth (intermittently)

4) Munching as opposed to chewing

5) open mouth breathing

6) does not have straight line on lips when closed

7) big gulps when drinking liquids

8) wide excursion when chewing

9) high palate

10) cross bite

Just asking for guidance: I started working on keeping tongue on spot, lips together and swallowing with “cheese swallow” open lips. Just making sure I’m going in the right direction. …

Very difficult for her to keep her tongue up…

Any suggestions? I would really appreciate it.

The symptoms you describe take us the full 3 – 4 days to go over.  I wish there was something I could tell you to guide you, but without spending a lot of hours, it won’t make sense.

Our course takes you in steps from first, eliminating all barriers.  This is such things as assuring that there is no airway issue, no ankylosed frena of tongue or lip, no appliances that affect success, and much more.

Then we maximize what the tongue, lips and other muscles can do based on each patient’s capacity.  We make sure there is lingual mandibular differentiation in vertical, horizontal, and lateral excursions; also labial mandibular differentiation.

We have a baseline at the beginning and we make sure they pass or maximize various areas related to the above plus a few more area such as the basic suctioning skills.  Later skills are included in later “assessments”.

Only then do we even think about tongue placement for resting posture.

Once the resting posture is well underway, depending upon the particular artic problem, we initiate speech at given places.  For example, it there is lateral emission in the speech, we would begin at a different place in our program than if it is an interdental one.  That way, we have covered all bases and it is then fair to begin the speech aspect.

I know this is confusing, but it gives you an idea of how the world of articulation and other types of speech disorders will completely open for you. Unfortunately, it is not a pick and choose situation where I can give you ideas for ‘exercises” since it is a sequential program that makes sure the client is prepared at each step before giving the next one.  Otherwise you have someone “unnaturally” performing tasks that cannot become habituated because of the steps that were omitted.  That is the biggest draw for many of the SLPs and why they want our course and program in particular.

I am not trying to delay you, etc. but you will understand after the training course why I couldn’t answer your questions or help you significantly at this time.

Now for sure I am anxious to work with you!!!  You described your client with so many of the classic myo symptoms that I wish they would let you take videos to share so we could help others.  I suggest that you get videos for yourself at the very least with their permission because it will be very useful to you as you progress in the orofacial myology world….

See you soon in class!