The month of May is Better Hearing and Speech Month. So this week I am posting some interesting facts about the field of speech therapy. Most people think that speech therapy is just helping a child that has trouble saying the –r or –s sound. When I tell people what I do-they often tell me about their stories of the speech therapist at their school. Of how the speech therapist would get them out of class and bring them back 30 minutes later with a sticker. But the field of Speech therapy is so broad! We are able to work with patients when they are babies and sadly until the end stages of life. Today I am going to take you through the stages of life and tell you how a speech therapist can help: 1. Birth-SLP often help babies that have difficulty sucking and swallowing. 2. Age 1-2: Some children have difficulty with play skills and have delayed first words. Also this is when some characteristics of Autism start to appear. 3. Ages 3-4: An SLP can help children that have weak language skills: unable to answer questions, unable to follow directions, only using 1-2 words when communicating with others. 4. Age 5-18: Many children will present with difficulties producing sounds that make their speech difficult to understand. Also if the language system is still impaired it makes regular classwork such as comprehension tasks, math words problems and independent classwork where the child has to read and interpret the instructions-very difficult. Also if a child has difficulty socializing with others- we are trained to help them with social skills. 5. Age 19-55: At this age we often see patients that have had a traumatic brain injury after an accident or fall. Speech therapist help those patients retrain those cognitive skills. 6. Age 56-120: Many of our older patients have had a stroke. This can result in difficulty speaking, swallowing and difficulty with cognitive tasks such as memory. We are trained to address all of these. Also many of our older patients have other illnesses such as Parkinson’s Disease, Alzheimer’s Disease and Myasthenia Gravis. This is by no means an exhaustive list-Speech therapists work with patients of all ages on their voice quality, they help them gain or lose an accent and many more things. So the next time someone says that they are a Speech-Language Pathologist-you will know that there is more than meets the eye.