[Dysphagia] reply to e-stim question

[pressmah at sjhmc.org (Pressman, Hilda)]

I'm glad to hear that you are documenting progress with an MBS.  How does the MBS help you to decide where to place the electrodes?  Hilda Pressman

-----Original Message-----
From: dysphagia-bounces at b9.com [mailto:dysphagia-bounces at b9.com]On
Behalf Of Sherri Repsher
Sent: Wednesday, February 28, 2007 2:20 PM
To: dysphagia at b9.com
Subject: [Dysphagia] reply to e-stim question


I work in acute rehab.

We have found success in all populations with dysphagia using vital stim. My facility generally sees patients with stroke, brain injury, dysphagia due to generalized weakness, throat cancer (base of tongue), parkinson's, MS, GBS...

For inpatients we do the therapy 5x/week, 1 hr session. For outpatients, we do 3x/week, 1 hr sessions. We always do an MBS prior to the start of therapy to identify the proper placement of the electrodes. We do about 10-15 sessions of vital stim and then repeat the MBS to identify changes in the functional swallow. If we are making progress, we continue another round and repeat again. If we do not see change, we may change theplacement of the electrodes or alter what we are doing during the therapy session. Every patient is different. Some patients have functional improvement after 1 round of therapy (10-15 sessions) and some take much longer, like 5 rounds of therapy. Almost all of our patients demonstrate some form of functional change in their swallow function. We discharge them when they are at the point of having a functional swallow and requiring no strategies or maybe only a few strategies or if they are at a point where they are not changing on the MBS.

Hope this helps.


Sherri Repsher, MS, CCC-SLP/L
Clinical Specialist, Speech Pathology
srepsher at gsrh.org
610-776-3232

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