As LSVT® Certified Clinicians, you’ve seen how transformative LSVT LOUD® and LSVT BIG® can be for people living with Parkinson’s and other neurological conditions. After the intensive, one-on-one therapy ends, though, many of your patients ask, “What’s next?” That’s where LOUD for LIFE and BIG for LIFE come in.
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Imagine having a tool that tracks your client’s vocal intensity in real-time with calibrated accuracy, automatically calculates progress, stores all your data, and even provides visual feedback to keep your client engaged. That’s not wishful thinking, that’s LSVT Coach.
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Duffy (2013) defines speech intelligibility as the “degree of accuracy with which a listener recovers the acoustic signal or message produced by a speaker.” Kent (1992) considers intelligibility as the paramount issue in speech pathology, “the behavioral standard of communication.”
Speech intelligibility can be severely reduced in Parkinson’s disease (PD); it can be among the main concerns of people with PD (Miller et al., 2007). The validity and reliability in assessing speech intelligibility in PD may be affected by several factors.
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If you are a physical (PT) or occupational therapist (OT) working with older adults or neuro populations, you are most likely familiar with LSVT BIG® treatment approach, which is built on a very specific treatment dose: 60‑minute, individual sessions, 4 days per week for 4 weeks, for a total of 16 visits. This “dose” is not a preference or arbitrary in nature; it is the parameter used in the research on LSVT BIG that results in clinically significant improvements in amplitude, gait, and functional mobility in people with Parkinson’s.
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Research studies are fantastic. They give us the evidence we need to justify treatment choices, advocate for clients, and feel confident in what we’re doing. But let’s be real, reading a research article and actually implementing an approach with your own caseload are two very different things.
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If you’re an ortho or sports physical therapist (PT), Parkinson’s disease (PD) may seem like a “neuro” issue—important, but not your primary focus. Yet many patients you treat for rotator cuff tears, arthritis, lumbar pain, and sports injuries either already have PD or will develop it during your career. You may be one of the first professionals who can spot early signs and change their long-term trajectory.
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We are thrilled to share the news that the manuscript “Harmonic Amplitude Differences Before and After Voice Treatment for Parkinson’s Disease and Their Relationship to Voice Quality and Speech Intelligibility” is now ‘in press’ in the Journal of Voice!
We asked one of the authors, Dr. Michael Cannito, to summarize the article by sharing his perspectives. Plus, all of the authors share their thoughts through a quote. The entire manuscript can be accessed by the here.
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When working with individuals diagnosed with Down syndrome, physical therapy often focuses on more than just movement—it’s about building confidence, independence, and quality of life. This case study highlights the progress of one patient who began therapy in June 2025 with concerns about balance, functional mobility, and endurance.
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When we think about speech treatment for children with cerebral palsy (CP), familiar challenges often come to mind: reduced loudness, imprecise articulation, monotone pitch and communication breakdowns that limit their real-world participation. Many of us have also felt the frustration of seeing progress in the therapy room that doesn’t always carry over to daily life.
Continue Reading →Rewiring the Brain, One LOUD Voice at a Time: Neuroplasticity based speech treatment for Parkinson’s
Twenty years ago, a paper in Seminars in Speech and Language described a new way to think about speech treatment in Parkinson’s disease: use principles of neuroplasticity to drive lasting change in voice and communication. That work grew out of clinical research in the late 1980s at the Lee Silverman Center for Parkinson’s in Scottsdale, Arizona, where Dr. Lorraine Ramig and speech-language pathologist Carolyn Mead Bonotati focused on a simple question: could intensive, targeted voice training help the brain reorganize itself to support better communication?
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