Johan Otter, PT, OCS

Director, Ancillary Services

VitalStim® Therapy has shown great promise with patients with swallowing difficulties and we have had incredible results with it.

I was very excited when Jan Speirs introduced me to VitalStim® Therapy.

The therapy appeared to be more specific than anything we had available before and could be used in a functional manner for treating the throat area.

Second, VitalStim Therapy challenged the notion that you cannot use electrical stimulation in the throat area. In school we had learned that you could not use ES in the throat because doing so could loosen plaques in the carotid artery or adversely affect the nerve ganglions in the area.

We assumed that our professors were correct and did not challenge this notion even though there was not much in the way of scientific proof offered to back up the warnings about the contraindications.

VitalStim Therapy showed that our attitudes were based on fear, not science. It is the sort of thing that makes you wonder, why didn't anyone else think of it? Why didn't I think of it?

Since Jan Speirs brought VitalStim Therapy to us, we have trained all our professional speech therapy staff in it and now have eight certified VitalStim Therapy therapists.

More important, VitalStim Therapy has shown great promise with patients with swallowing difficulties and we have had incredible results with it. Among our successes is a cancer patient who had not eaten in two years and who had shown no real improvement with conventional swallowing therapies. He ate for the first time after a series of treatments at our Voice and Swallowing Center.

While testimonials are great, more work needs to be done in double-blind studies and other clinical trials to demonstrate VitalStim Therapy's effectiveness, its reliability and to confirm long-term results.

In the meantime, we do intend to go on offering the therapy. There are no irreversible effects as long as the therapist is properly trained in the techniques, its indications and contraindications.

And, after all, patients are getting better.