A Voice Apart

When the person with a voice disorder is trying to live a (so to speak) normal life, he/she is definitely experiencing some difficulties in communication with others; nevertheless, at their work place and even in their family lives. They are usually very frustrated with their voice which is not, by far, sounding the same as before. They are also not very well understood and are, quite often, being asked several times to repeat or to reiterate what they were trying to say. That makes those people with voice disorders understandably very irritable and overall, very emotional. They feel like they are handicapped (in a manner of speaking), and understandably so. Some of them are so disillusioned that they carry with them a sign, advising the strangers that they have difficulty to speak. Others who have lost the hope to regain a normal voice are even starting to learn sign language.  How sad is that?  A lot of those people have lost hope with respect of living th...

Needless to say that lately, especially since the recession kicked in, people became even more stressed out than before opposed to when they had good jobs, decent money to live on, and reasonable family lives. I always said that the voice is the spirit and it does reflect the state of the persons’ being. When the persons’ livelihood is in jeopardy and his/her world falls to pieces, it is no wonder that their spirit will be very down and, respectively, their voice will start sounding much lower in tone, much more stressed, less announced and with much less clarity. In some cases, the voice gets so laid back that it begins to gradually fall onto the lower part of the throat; and thus begins to sound very dull and somewhat hoarse .  Then the person might experience what’s called acid reflux , as the voice is drawn so low, that it evidently meets gastric acid. The person will experience the burning on the back of the vocal cords and sometimes even difficulty of breathi...

Naturally, since I am in the voice repair business, I have been getting a lot of calls and e-mails from people with various voice problems  and voice disorders. Some of them had those problems for the longest time (in some cases even for 30 years and longer)! Nevertheless, the long-time sufferers were pretty much adjusted to their adapted lifestyles, as they thought that they tried pretty much everything, but nothing worked for them. So, on that premise, they were trying to learn how to "live with it"...? Can you blame them? In a real sense... YES and NO. No, because they have suffered enough and were unable to find the desired solution. Yes, because they probably did not try hard enough and, nonetheless, did not try smart enough. At least that category of people whose voice problems /disorders were actually treatable and even, partially curable. The category of people described above, probably - and most likely, gave up too fast and too soon. Not too...