May 24, 2013
There's a new treatment at Pitt County Memorial Hospital that's helping people with swallowing problems. It's called Vital-Stim.
Speech pathologist Janie Howell uses Vital-Stim in addition to traditional speech therapy methods with patients suffering from Dysphagia, or trouble swallowing. Howell says one significant benefit of Vital-Stim is time.
Vital-Stim works by sending small electrical currents to inactive swallowing muscles in the patient, lessening the number of times traditional swallowing exercises must be performed Howell says.
The makers of Vital-Stim say an estimated 15,000,000 people in the United States have a current diagnosis of Dysphagia.
