Audiology and Speech Therapy

It’s difficult to imagine a single day life when we can’t hear the world. There are many cases of hearing impaired patients coming from all over India in many of the hospitals including Max healthcare, Fortis Hospital, Apollo Hospital etc. Audiology is a study that deals with the imperfections in hearing and evaluating them as per the imperfections occurring in the patient. The branch deals with the medical science which provides the best available medical technology to solve the hearing disorder of the patients. The problem of hearing is not limited to hearing only it even affects the communication skill of the person as without hearing a person we cannot respond properly. If we go through the medical reports then we will realize that there are many cases in which parents are tensed as their children are not a good speaker like there are people who have issues in their mouth and they can’t even pronounce the words which are quite common. Recent researches witness the developments in audiology department like there are instruments introduced for hearing impaired persons and the speech therapy. The speech therapy is designed in such a way that it works on improving speech and comprehending as well as expressing language.

Treatment of Hearing impairment- the devices like hearing aids are introduced for treating the hearing disorders

patients and cochlear implant is also one of them. Though cochlear implant works more efficient than hearing aids as it acts as an exact copy of the damaged parts and transfers the sound signals to the brain. It helps to those who have problems in both the ears either moderate or extreme and in the case if the hearing aids don’t work on the patient.

Advantages of Cochlear implant:

• It works more efficiently than the hearing aids.
• Sentence understanding level reaches up to 80%.
• Makes it quite easy for a patient to feel comfortable even in the high noisy environment.
• It makes the disabled person enjoy their life by listening to music, talking to their dear ones on phones.
• It helps the patients to communicate and converse and make them feel safer.

Speech Therapy- the therapy works verbally and non-verbally both. There are different approaches used for treating the patient and that depends upon the intensity of the disorder. There are many activities which are introduced to help the patients recover from their disorder. The activities include physical exercises, speech drills and the practice of sound production. The problems which are included under speech therapy are stammering, speech delay and misarticulation of language etc. occurring mostly in children.

Reasons of speech disorder- there are numerous reasons of a person having speech disorder issues like it may happen due to psychological trauma and some congenital defects like cerebral palsy and cleft palate. The problem of speech disorder is not only limited to children there are certain cases of old aged or grown-ups too. They may face the issue of losing communication skills due to several reasons like stroke, any accident or removal of larynx (due to cancer in any part of the body).

Benefits of Speech Therapy-

• It improves the ability of patients to express the ideas, thoughts and feelings of the patients.
• It provides better life quality to the patients.
• It enhances the school readiness skills.
• Self-esteem of the person reaches at a higher level.
• It increases the vocal quality and helps in making the speech fluent.

Note: Children having delay speech problem should be taken for the therapy before completing three years of age as it is the age when brain starts thinking maturely and learning process is so fast at this age.

Limitations of Speech Therapy-