1. Paediatric Speech & Language Therapy

If your child has problem with communicating clearly, if he or she fumbles and babbles, stutters or experiences extreme difficulty in even putting sentences together, Rise to Shine will be of help. We provide the Speech and Language Therapy for children, to treat their speech and/or language disorders and delay. This therapy would help the child communicate better and improve his or her ability to understand and express ideas or thoughts clearly, follow directions and honing their ability to read and learn different subjects too.

After an evaluation of whether your child is facing a communication delay or disorder, our dedicated speech and language therapists will make an individualised therapy plan. Once this is done, the therapist will get working with your child with utmost care and empathy helping them learn, meet their goals and achieve maximum results.

2. Feeding and Swallowing Therapy

The process of learning to eat is pretty natural in human. As a child, there is a lot of spilling of food, inability to suck, pushing food back out and so on. With age and time, this should go away. But sometimes, it doesn’t. This is called Feeding and Swallowing disorder, where a child has trouble eating food correctly or they may be taking long time to eat. Swallowing happens in three stages, which are:

• The Oral Phase- Where the child has problem in sucking, chewing and moving any food or liquid down the throat.
• The Pharyngeal Phase- Where the child is unable to close off his air way that keeps excess liquid or food out. Otherwise, it would lead to choking and coughing.
• Esophageal phase- Esophagus is the muscular tube that connects the throat to the stomach. If there is any problem in the esophagus, the child may throw up a lot.

Some of the symptoms include:

• Inadequate weight gain
• Crying and being fussy when feeding
• Refusal to eat or drink
• Throws up a lot
• Experiences trouble in breathing while eating or drink
• Takes enormously long time to eat

There even could be other physical challenges that makes it hard for the child to chew and swallow. Our therapists will work with you and your child to diagnose and address the exact problem the child is facing.

Swallowing disorder (dysphagia) involves feeding and swallowing difficulties, which may occur due to illness, surgery or stroke. Dysphagia is one of the most common problem among the geriatric population. Considering all the diseases that happen with age, health complications such as stroke and dementia shows a large rate of feeding and swallowing disorder. It is mostly associated with nutritional deficits and an increased risk of pneumonia. It is important to remember, that there has been a close connection between recovering post a stroke, traumatic brain injury, parkinson’s disease and difficulty in swallowing and feeding.

3. Teletherapy

As per definition, “Teletherapy is the application of telecommunications technology to delivery of professional services at a distance by linking clinician to client, or clinician to clinician, for assessment, intervention, and/or consultation.” To put it in simple words, Teletherapy is a therapy that is carried out with the help of technology, the digital world. It involves providing therapy to the patient through video calling (Skype, FaceTime, Messenger, etc).

It works just the way a normal one-on-one therapy would work, but through video. Therefore, an exciting and innovative service delivery that enables our therapists to reach out to their patients in farthest corners of the world, just by a video connection.

4. Voice Therapy

Sometimes, our vocal chords develop issues that make it difficult for us to speak properly. This can be due to a problem in the complex functioning of the vocal muscles. They might become tight, strained or sometimes even imbalanced. This in turn leads to a lot of frustration and disorders.

Voice therapy is a method to treat this disorder and give you relief from them. This is done by a series of different exercises, vocal as well as physical, along with some behavioural changes. It helps you set free from the misery of the symptoms that bring you to Rise to Shine. The symptoms vary from person to person. Our therapists at Rise to Shine dedicatedly help you through the process and focus on chalking out a plan for your proper treatment.

5. Accent modification therapy

Accent modification, also known as Accent Reduction therapy is an approach towards adopting to or learning a new speech accent. Many a times, people may travel to and settle in different countries for work or other purpose. Accent can sometimes become a huge barrier in communication with the local crowd. Once you develop an accent, it can become difficult to do away with it just simply. Speech Pathologists play a very big role in this Accent Modification Therapy.

The Speech Therapist first does an analysis of the client’s speech and then set goals for them according to their requirement and the result of our analysis. Then, basic sounds, principles and modification techniques, and voice projections are taught to the client over a series of sessions. With this, separate practice material is also provided to the client.

6. Fluency Therapy

Fluency therapy also known as the stuttering therapy, in simple words, is the therapy to reduce stuttering in children and in adults to some degree. There are many traditional techniques that facilitate the speech therapy for fluency disorders. However, with technology being so advanced today, new kinds of fluency therapy approaches are now available, with varying degrees of being successful.

The therapy for children (aged 6 years and below) requires a huge contribution from the parents and the family. practicing this therapy would otherwise be considered futile. The therapy focuses on providing an environment that encourages slow speech, giving the child time to talk, and modeling slowed and relaxed speech which can help reduce stuttering.

Some of the other approaches include:

1. The Lidcombe Program -A treatment program developed specifically for children stuttering younger than six. It is known to effective with school-age children too. The This program is based on a body of laboratory-operant conditioning research. This program contains two main stages. In stage 1, the child stops stuttering and in stage 2, the treatment gain is maintained for a longer period. It is important to remember that this treatment involves the participation of the parents more. the therapist only teaches parents how to conduct the tratment.

2. Fluency Shaping- This therapy involves teaching the stutterer to use a style of speaking that involves careful and prominent self-monitoring; like, the stutterer slows his speech down and smoothes out all his words, or in which the physical mechanisms used in the speech production are retrained.

3. Modifying Phonation Intervals (MPI)- A speech therapy which is effective in training adults who stutter. Its main focus is to achieve fluent and natural sounding speech and this is done by learning to speak with a reduced number of short intervals of phonation. A computer-aided, bio-feedback program that requires appropriate software (MPI smartphone app) and hardware (a throat microphone headset) which records the phonation intervals, or PIs, from the surface of the speaker’s throat.

7. Geriatric Speech And Language Therapy

The ability to communicate clearly is important for people of all ages, but it is specifically important for the elderly. Studies have shown that speech and language disorders affecting the elderly population is often a result of stroke, Parkinson’s disease, disease of the larynx or any other neurological disorder. Other than these, cognitive communication disorder is also very common between the elderly post any of the disease mentioned above. In this, the person affected by it experiences problems in paying attention, forming judgement, retain memory, language and so on. It is vital to remember that situations could get worse in case of emergencies. If they aren’t able to convey any of the discomforts that they are facing, how will we be able to help them?