Voice Disorders 101

What is Spasmodic Dysphonia?

The medical establishment believes that SD is a focal form of dystonia, a neurological voice disorder that involves involuntary “spasms” of the vocal cords causing interruptions of speech and affecting the voice quality. SD can cause the voice to break up or to have a tight, strained, or strangled quality. My 35 years of dealing with SD successfully with ongoing cures by DVR tells me that SD is not a dystonia but simply a wrong use of voice.

What is Direct Voice Rehabilitation?

Direct Voice Rehabilitation (DVR) does work. It has produced numerous documented cures, recoveries, and improvements with all types of SD for over 30 years. DVR helps patients with SD and other bad voice habits directly, simply, and naturally in a sequenced step-by-step procedure until a natural and healthy voice is developed, used, and integrated.

DVR is neither speech therapy nor traditional voice therapy. DVR concentrates on specific variables of voice-pitch, tone focus, and breath support-using voice behavioral modification. In addition to these mechanical variables, a change of voice identity or “voice image” is the key psychological factor that helps the patient use the right voice.

Unlike the common view that SD is neurological and the treatment choices are “to cut or to inject,” DVR is based on a different paradigm: SD is functional and actuated by unintentional voice misuse and abuse; SD is not a dystonia but rather a mechanical dysphonia.

Why your doctor won’t tell you about Direct Voice Rehabilitation

In 1982, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Hospital, I presented patients with confirmed severe SD who told of recovering their speaking voices by DVR.

The late Henry J. Rubin, a well-known ENT specialist, asked during the presentation, “We know that you are the only one successful by speech therapy. Why?”

The answer is, “I do not do speech therapy; I do Direct Voice Rehabilitation.”

In 1990, Dr. Rubin commented:

In the fifteen years immediately preceding my retirement from the active practice of otolaryngology, I have referred my patients in need of voice rehabilitation to Dr. Cooper because his results proved to be the most consistently satisfactory. His methods seemed essentially to be quite simple, in fact to the point sometimes of challenging believably, but they worked. He explains these methods in his book, and I believe that any voice therapist who gives them a serious and unbiased trial will be agreeably surprised.

In 1993 he wrote to me:

The medical and speech professions may continue to deny your obvious successes but it is because of unfamiliarity with what you actually do. Ignorance of your methods breeds fear, and that equates with resistance and denial.