Hoarse patients get sound advice
BY Wendy soderburg
Today Staff writer
Don’t be surprised if you run into a celebrity or two going up or coming down from the fifth floor of the Bank of America building in Westwood, where the UCLA Voice Center for Medicine and the Arts recently opened.
“Los Angeles is really the entertainment capital of the world, and we have the largest concentration of people who use their voice, either in music or acting, than probably any other city,” said voice center director Gerald Berke, chief of the Division of Head and Neck Surgery in the Geffen School of Medicine. “This is really the first center of its kind on the West Coast.”
While the center’s digs are new, its work is not. Over the previous two decades the voice center has existed in a rather nebulous form, with facilities for patient care, inpatient surgery, research and education spread throughout the UCLA campus.
Now the center, furnished with hardwood floors and soft-toned walls, finally has a space of its own to care for patients undergoing vocal rehabilitation. And soon it will add a voice/sound studio where patients can record their voices in privacy and comfort.
“You can think of us as a multidisciplinary center where physicians, speech pathologists, vocal coaches and people from different domains help those who might need work with their ability to communicate, either in health or disease states,” Berke explained.
The majority of the center’s patients are referred to UCLA by other doctors or speech pathologists for problems ranging from a lingering case of laryngitis to spasmodic dysphonia, a fairly rare condition caused by involuntary movements of one or more muscles of the larynx. Persons afflicted with this condition speak with a strained voice and often exhibit voice spasms that interrupt their speech, making it extremely difficult to complete sentences.
“The most typical problem that we see, believe it or not, are patients who develop a hoarseness from acid coming up in the back of their throat and bathing their vocal chords for a length of time,” Berke said. “That’s acid reflux, and that can actually be silent in a fair percentage of patients. The only manifestation they have is that they can become very hoarse and have difficulty speaking.”
Most members of the center’s multidisciplinary team — Berke, fellow head-and-neck surgeons Dinesh Chhetri and Joel Sercarz, and speech scientist Bruce Gerratt — are on UCLA’s faculty. But because many of the center’s patients are professional performers, several vocal coaches are also on staff, including Seth Riggs, whose students have included Natalie Cole, Michael Jackson and Bette Midler.
One grateful patient is Marilyn Grabowski, vice president and West Coast photo editor for Playboy Magazine, who began losing her voice about 15 years ago. She was diagnosed by Berke as having spasmodic dysphonia.
“There were times when I couldn’t talk beyond a whisper,” said Grabowski, who initially was treated with Botox injections into the vocal chords. She finally had surgery to correct the problem in January 2005. “It’s a long and difficult process,” she said. “You have to learn to swallow and eat without choking, and you don’t have a voice for probably three or four months. But you forget about all that when you see the results.
“Dr. Berke is a genius as far as I’m concerned, because [losing my voice] was very difficult given what was required of me in my job. I can’t say enough about him. He’s amazing.” |
