Do I have to clean my voice to practice good vocal hygeine?
This person had to self-evaluate how they used their voice everyday for a week. Then they took their journal back to the speech therapist they worked with to look at their old behaviors and what they did that was damaging. They also had to begin to learn to engage in new behaviors to insure the vocal nodules did not recur.
Old behaviors that were not good for the health of their voice included smoking cigarettes or cigars or being in a smoky environment, straining the voice excessively by screaming and talking way too loudly in loud environments, drinking alcohol and caffeine which dry the throat by removing excessive amounts of water from the body, loud coughing and throat clearing during allergy season and during colds, using medication that dried the throat tissues when sick and last but not least, singing outside the range of their vocal ability. In other words they tried to sing soprano when they should have sang alto.
The new behaviors they had to work on included no more smoking or spending time in smoky environments, drinking ALOT of water to make the tissues of the throat more moist, reducing the amount of alcohol and caffeine to almost none, awareness of allergy medicine side effects and which were less drying for the throat tissues, signaling someone to move away from loud environments to speak with them, reducing the amount of times they clear their voice or coughed during colds and also learning how to do both softly to cause the least amount of damage, identifying a pitch that was safer to sing in that did not strain the vocal chords since singing lower in pitch (more alto-like) is less damaging to the chords as they beat together fewer times per minute than does singing in a high pitch (soprano-like). Sometimes they will still lose their voice and have laryngitis despite their best efforts and then the only thing they can do to help themselves is "voice rest"...... Yup, no talking for a few DAYS!!!!!
This profile is typical of most of the behaviors speech therapists help treat. This is only the first step of several for a person with voice problems such as nodules or other abnormalities caused by misusing their voice. Often times a few more weeks of actual voice therapy is needed. Sometimes a person needs to learn biofeedback techniques as well as relaxation techniques to keep their throat,
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