A Voice Apart

Get this: From Strep Throat - To Laryngitis - To Vocal Cord Paralysis... Isn’t that peculiar? More and more, in my practice (in over four decades), I have been hearing about the devastating vocal disorder - Vocal Paresis, also known as Vocal Paralysis. The interesting thing is that a lot of other vocal disorders are usually caused by speaking and/or singing in the wrong (and often aggressive) way. - Vocal Paresis, as well as, (for example) Spasmodic Dysphonia (SD) , quite often have additional reasons for their occurrence. Interestingly enough, I hear a lot about some kind of a virus (or even a simple cold) that had produced vocal paresis affecting one or even both vocal cords. When a person is under a lot of stress, their immune system subsides which means that they become more susceptible to all kinds of infections, colds, and needless to say viruses. Some time ago, a client from Atlanta, Georgia, USA came with one paralyzed vocal cord, which occurred after he experienced a really s...

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...