A Voice Apart

“I’m not a reborn Christian, I am a reborn human,” said Karen Gundling, my recent voice repair client from Ottawa, Ontario.  Like many of my other clients, Karen lived with her voice disorder for almost two decades.  She had seen many medical professionals, alternative doctors, and nevertheless, speech therapists. To all of them, she had been complaining about the pain in her throat, her neck and her shoulder, evidently associated with that.  Practically all of them told her that it is “all in her head”.  Only one of the specialists was able to diagnose her with muscle tension dysphonia (MTD) , but like everybody else, he was not able to administrate any kind of treatment which would help Karen to get rid of her nagging pain while speaking.  Needless to say, she was devastated and practically was ready to give up on life.  She is a very vibrant and boisterous person who loves to talk a lot. Some of the so-called medical professionals ordered her to keep silent fo

Lately I attract more and more voice repair clients who have problems with speech and not necessarily with singing. Some of them have been suffering for two or even three decades with diagnoses like muscle tension dysphonia (MTD), spasmodic dysphonia, vocal cords burned with acid reflux and many other voice issues . None of them were able to get any meaningful help from medical doctors or even specialists and let alone from speech therapists. Some of my clients have seen numerous speech therapists who offered them to blow into a kazoo, blow into a straw to a glass of water, and yawn with an excessive sigh ! According to those speech therapists the muscles on their patients’ necks and their vocal cords for that matter will get relaxed and that’s how all of their vocal issues will be solved … ??? In my humble opinion all of those manipulations are completely obsolete, useless, and counter-productive. By following the above, nothing meaningful can be produce

Working with voice repair clients for over 4 decades, I have determined that any voice disorder requires at least 30 hours of intense and tedious instruction and natural herbal and, in some cases, homeopathic treatment. The voice repair sufferer should understand that not only their speaking and/or singing voices have to be fixed, but it also requires the adaptation of the new modality of the completely new behavior with respect of using speaking, and especially, singing voice. Moreover, after the voice is fixed and the new vocal behavior has been established, the, so to speak, “screws” have to be tightened to confirm the new adapted habits. The intellectual understanding of the very intelligent method of visualization has to be interconnected with the motor skills and the kinesthetic feel. It also requires an establishment of the muscle memory such as facial muscles adapting the sound, and upper and lower abdominal muscles which require to work

I must have given not million, but billion singing, speech and voice repair designated hours, serving at least 20,000 clients for over 31 years running a professional vocal school. For the last three decades, I have been mostly specializing in Non-Surgical Voice Repair more so than the regular singing or speech lessons . It appears to be that more and more people are ruining their speaking and singing voices , not knowing how to properly use their voices, let alone knowing how to take care of their voices. Usually, their lifestyles are quite unhealthy – diet wise, fitness wise, and enormous stress wise. They live a very strained life, so to speak. Naturally, a lot of them, ( speakers and singer s ), are pushing and pulling their voices while concurrently gripping their voices into their necks, thus paving their way to what’s called Muscle Tension Dysphonia. While having these symptoms, naturally these people affected by them, are thinking of going