How many of you have eaten today?

Did you make sure to follow these steps carefully:

1. Place a bolus on your back molars
2. Focus on bilaterally chewing
3. Sweep your tongue across your teeth to move the chewed bolus towards your throat
4. Ensure your epiglottis is closed
5. Engage muscles of the throat as you moved the chewed bolus into the esophagus, sending it to the stomach

If you are like 73% of people, you didn’t think about any of these steps. You just put the food in, chewed and swallowed, probably while thinking about your schedule, driving, or reading your phone.

So, what of the other 23% of the world’s population? These have been diagnosed with dysphasia, a swallowing disorder.

Dysphasia is common after a stroke, or some medications. It can be neurological or biological based, causes by muscle weakness or nerve damage.

The most current treatment for dysphasia is electrical muscle stimulation (e-stim) therapy. Electrodes are attached to the face and neck, over the effected muscles. Then, low-level electrical pulses are sent through muscles when assistance is required to swallow. Essentially, e-stim gives a boost to the muscles’ movement, similar to a spotter when weightlifting.

While far more common in the older population, dysphasia can occur in children. My brother “Henry” struggled with dysphasia when he was a year old. Due to the lack of therapists trained locally in E-Stim, my mom, two of my sisters, and “Henry” lives out of state on week every month for nine months so he could receive therapy 6 hours/day 6 days/week. Thankfully, the therapy worked, and today the child who gagged on one milliliter of formula eats as well as any other six year old.