Swallow Your Pride Podcast

On this episode of The Swallow Your Pride Podcast, I sit down with Nicole Schaen-Heacock, PhD, CCC-SLP, a postdoctoral fellow in the Advanced Fellowship in Geriatrics at the William S. Middleton Memorial Veterans Hospital in Madison, working in Dr. Nicole Rogus-Pulia's swallowing and salivary bioscience lab. Nicole won first place for the New Investigator Award at this year's DRS conference for part of her dissertation on how the timing of swallow-based intervention affects outcomes in a head and neck cancer treatment model. We get into her research, her path from clinician to PhD to postdoc, and a candid conversation about doing hard academic work while raising twin toddlers.

On this episode of The Swallow Your Pride Podcast, Theresa sits down with Cari Manypenny, MS, CCC-SLP, Associate Director of Medical Affairs at Phagenesis, and Alyssa Cook, MA, CCC-SLP, Therapy Development Manager at Phagenesis, to talk about pharyngeal electrical stimulation (PES) and what it means for medical SLPs treating post-stroke dysphagia. Cari and Alyssa both made the transition from acute care clinical practice to the medical device industry, and they bring a deeply clinical perspective to the conversation.

They cover the basics of what PES actually is, how the Phagenyx device works, and why it is fundamentally different from neuromuscular electrical stimulation. They dig into the science behind the therapy, including the 30-plus years of foundational neuroscience research that led to its development, the nine randomized controlled trials in stroke populations, and what it means that PES was included in the 2026 AHA/ASA Stroke Guidelines. They also talk through patient selection, what treatment actually looks like session-to-session, how hospitals and SLP teams can bring this technology into their institutions, and why Alyssa believes PES gives medical SLPs a bigger seat at the multidisciplinary table.

Episode Page: https://syppodcast.com/405
Website: https://www.phagenesis.com/

Paige DiStefano walks through her research on FEES implementation in an acute care hospital that already had regular access to video fluoroscopy, and what the data showed when FEES came back online after the equipment was down for over a year.

On this episode of The Swallow Your Pride Podcast, Theresa sits down with Kate Hutcheson, PhD, CCC-SLP, BCS-S, Peter Belafsky, MD, M.P.H., PhD, and Andrew Tritter, MD, for a listening party unlike anything the dysphagia world has ever seen. What started as a dinner conversation at the Dysphagia Research Society about overrated anatomical structures became something none of them planned: a full-length AI-assisted music album called "One Night at La Reserve." Theresa plays several tracks live on this episode, including "The Hyoid," "Pharyngeal Jam," "Rad Tox Blues," "DIGEST," and more. The album is available on iTunes and coming to Spotify, with proceeds supporting the National Foundation of Swallowing Disorders.

Links:

Get One Night at La Reserve on:
Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/us/album/one-night-at-la-reserve/1888366428
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/7z5ItKFX5OguKijNMZqZ0M?si=JHED8QApSOiSZYOQAgqMAg

On this episode of The Swallow Your Pride Podcast, Theresa sits down with Debra Suiter, PhD, CCC-SLP, BCS-S, F-ASHA — Director of the Voice and Swallow Clinic and Professor at the University of Kentucky — for a conversation that started as a personal text and turned into something the entire field needs to hear. Both Theresa and Dr. Suiter found themselves navigating hospitalizations for close family members at the same time, and what they witnessed from the family side of the bedside was deeply troubling: an overemphasis on aspiration risk, no shared decision making, no informed consent, and interventions that caused measurable harm in the name of preventing it. They discuss the Langmore 1998 paper, John Ashford's three pillars of aspiration pneumonia, why waivers are coercive, how documentation protects you, and how SLPs can use risk management and ethics committees to change practice patterns from the inside out. This one is personal. It's also clinical. And it's long overdue.

Get the informed consent bundle here: https://go.medslpcollective.com/informedconsentbundle

The post 402 – Bigger Fish to Fry: Why Our Field’s Fixation on Aspiration Is Costing Patients More Than We Realize with Dr. Debra Suiter appeared first on Swallow Your Pride Podcast.