SPECIAL PROGRAM
New Feeding Therapy Speeds Progress
Landyn Clark was born with a number of birth defects, and spent his first 18 months eating and breathing with help from a feeding tube and a trach tube and ventilator. He first started speech and feeding therapy at 8 months old. “Never in a million years did I think this process of learning to eat by mouth would take almost four years,” said mother Mackenzie Clark. “People can’t imagine the long process and the many stages it takes to get a child to even put food into his mouth, let alone chew and swallow safely.” After two years of therapy, as Mackenzie began to feel like the progress was plateauing, Beth Clark (no relation), supervisor of Speech Therapy for Children’s Hospital of Greenville Health System’s (GHS) Kidnetics® program, suggested VitalStim, a therapy that was just beginning to be used in the U.S. for pediatric patients with feeding and swallowing difficulties.
Above: Landyn Clark smiles during a session of VitalStim at Kidnetics. Right: For his first 18 months, Landyn needed a feeding tube and a trach and ventilator.
“VitalStim is neuromuscular electrical stimulation,” Clark explained. “It gives a very small electrical impulse through electrodes to the muscle it’s placed on, and it stimulates and contracts the muscle to strengthen it.” Once the muscle is stimulated, Clark said, the patient goes through traditional feeding therapy and exercises. She likened it to adding weights to your routine at the gym, instead of just doing repetitions.
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