I'm a Speech-Language Pathologist.

A good majority of you probably went "a Speech-Language- wha--?", and I don't blame you. Much like the name, it's a complex field. And frankly, people I've known my whole life still don't know what I do, so I've decided to take up my pen (well, my laptop) and break it down for everyone.

First off, we go by many names -- "The Speech Teacher", "The Speech Therapist", "The Speech guy/girl", "The Speechies", and my favorite one that I had just recently been called by one of my patients, "That woman who makes me THINK all the time!"

If you're a Speech-Language Pathologist, or as we call ourselves "SLPs" (pronounced by each letter S-L-P, not like 'sleeps' or 'slips'), you've probably gotten the awkward nods when you tell people about your career or even the "Oh! You treat stutters, right?". And if you only had the time, you would describe to people that treating stutters is only a sliver of our vast field, a tiny piece of everything we encompass.

We deal with all ages in schools, hospitals, skilled nursing care facilities, private practices, and homes, for treatment in a variety of different realms related to thinking, understanding, speaking, and swallowing.

YES, we help people get back to eating as well! Neat, huh?

For those who are having trouble swallowing, we educate them in ways to position their head and body, and even how to place the food inside their mouth to help things go down a little easier. "Trouble with swallowing" can be presented in many different ways. People could be coughing, choking, and throat clearing on their food consistently. Sometimes people notice their loved ones take an extremely long time to chew. Other occasions, people's ability to even start a swallow is impacted or even absent. We recommend specific solid and liquid textures for safer swallowing, and develop strategies and exercises to get them to eat and swallow safely again. And for the more compromised cases, we get people who are on feeding tubes back to eating food again.

We also offer services for those who have various diagnoses that end up impacting their brain, which in turn leaves certain parts of their thinking skills impaired. It is up to the SLP to assess what skills had been reduced, how much it's been affected, and consequently, what treatments we can do to help restore, adapt, or compensate for it. We treat people who have decreased memory, attention, reasoning, problem solving, safety awareness, thought organization, etc. Pretty much all types of thought processes people do, we have a way to help.

And of course, the most prevalent and well-known parts of our field -- the speech and language portions. From not having any language to having delayed development of language, from stutters and slurred speech to articulating certain sounds with difficulty (e.g., lisps or even the adorable "wabbit" for "rabbit"), from reading comprehension to sound-to-letter conversion (and vice versa) difficulties, from having trouble socializing properly to not having a clear voice or not even having a voice at all, we treat them all. We can even help out with reducing accents!

Simply put, we assess and develop plans to restore people's functions, find methods to compensate for their difficulties, and/or figure out adaptive devices they are applicable for to improve our clients'/students' functional communication and feeding abilities. You could say we're somewhat jack-of-most-trades. So next time you see your SLP friend, family member, co-worker, family friend, or friend of a friend, you can proudly tell them now that you have a pretty good idea of what they do, and what they can do. It's such a beautiful, ever vast, and ever fluid field, and I'm sure they would love to share what they do in more depth with willing listeners, so for more information, please refer to an SLP near you! ~