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(HealthNewsDigest.com) – NORFOLK, Va. — The recent release of The King’s Speech is drawing attention to the struggles of stutterers.
A film-festival favorite, the movie chronicles the challenges of Britain’s King George VI, who worked with a speech therapist to overcome a severe stutter and effectively lead his country as it braced for the eruption of World War II.
In the same way, Ross Barrett, a speech pathologist and director of the Precision Fluency Shaping Program (PFSP) at Eastern Virginia Medical School (EVMS), has helped more than a thousand people regain the power of verbal expression over the past twenty years.
A stutterer himself, Barrett well understands the physical and emotional strain that stutterers endure every day. The secret to overcoming it rests with understanding the nature of stuttering.
“For many years,” says Barrett, “doctors believed that stuttering was a psychological problem, when in fact, it is a physiological issue.”
A former stockbroker and investment adviser, Barrett now helps patients from all over the world. One of those people is Steve Lewis.
For most stutterers, there is terror in carrying out simple day-to-day tasks, Lewis explains. “As a child, it was a reluctance to respond to questions from my teacher even when I knew the correct answer or being afraid to ask for help in school when I didn’t understand — even if my grades suffered,” recalls Lewis.
When he was just 10 years old, Lewis recalls being terrified that he couldn’t speak during an emergency.
“My dad had cancer and he was having trouble so I had to call 911, but I couldn’t tell the operator what was wrong. I couldn’t get the words out.” Ultimately, the dispatcher sent an ambulance to his house, but for years, that failure to communicate when his father needed help weighed heavily on Lewis.
Like Lewis, approximately 1 percent of the adult population worldwide stutters and of those individuals, men are four times as likely as women to have a stuttering disorder.
There is no cure for stuttering — but recently, scientists have made strides toward better understanding the mechanisms behind it. For instance, scientists have discovered that genes are linked to stuttering. The hereditary component is reflected in the numbers — nearly 60 percent of people who stutter have family members who stutter as well.
Until a cure is found, Barrett’s program, located within the Department of Otolaryngology — Head and Neck Surgery, helps people regain their voice and manage the disorder. His program consists of 90 to 100 hours of intensive therapy distributed over 12 days (7-8 hours each day). Each individual receives personal supervision as they progress at their own pace while a computer monitors their speech to assure correct development of new speaking skills.
The process is called “fluency shaping” because, essentially, the speech of stutterers is being reconstructed. The stuttered speech is gradually and progressively shaped into fluent speech. In the therapy program, the physical mechanisms used in the production of speech are precisely and systematically retrained. Initially, participants relearn the proper means of producing elementary sounds. The stutterers then rebuild their ability to correctly produce syllables, words, and ultimately, complete sentences.
Lewis says that life changed for him drastically after participating in the program. “Before, I didn’t have any social life. I had low self-esteem and I felt isolated with very few friends,” says Lewis. “I had a lot to say, but no way to get it out. And I always felt like it was my fault and that there was something wrong with me. Growing up, that’s really rough.”
Lewis also has seen a marked difference in his professional success. He has gone from being a line cook making minimum wage to a corporate executive chef. And more recently, to challenge himself further, he decided to take a position in food sales, “That requires constant talking,” he says.
“My life is so different,” Lewis says. “I can express my ideas. I have a family, a great job and a good life style. You go from being nothing to being a person. I owe Ross so much.”
View before and after videos of PFSP patients: http://fluentspeech.com/videos.php
View the movie trailer: http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/weinstein/thekingsspeech/
About EVMS:
EVMS was founded by the community in 1973 to improve health through teaching, discovering and caring. The collaborative culture at EVMS draws like-minded students and faculty from all over the country, encourages a multidisciplinary approach to health care and emphasizes translational research. In just 36 years, the school has grown from 24 students to an economic footprint exceeding $700 million annually in the region of southeastern Virginia known as Hampton Roads. Learn more at www.evms.edu.
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