Most Active Stories Shots - Health Blog Mon December 26, 2011
Singing Therapy Helps Stroke Patients Speak Again Debra Meyerson
was hiking near Lake Tahoe 15 months ago when a stroke destroyed
part of the left side of her brain, leaving her literally
speechless. It happens to more than 150,000 Americans a year.
But now Meyerson is learning to talk again through an approach
that trains the undamaged right side of her brain to "speak."
Specifically, it's a region that controls singing. For more than
100 years, it's been known that people who can't speak after
injury to the speech centers on the left side of the brain can
sing. In the 1970s, Boston researchers started to use a sort of
"singing therapy" to help stroke survivors speak again. However,
it never caught on much – perhaps because a lot of therapists,
not to mention patients, weren't comfortable singing what they
wanted to say. And back then, the science wasn't advanced enough
to show the actual changes in the brain that result from the
therapy. That's c