On this episode of The Swallow Your Pride Podcast, Karli Negrin, MA, CCC-SLP, joins the show to talk about what happens when the clinical guidelines say one thing and the babies in front of you need another. Karli has spent nearly two decades in the cardiac intensive care unit at Nemours Children's Health working with infants with critical congenital heart disease. When she wanted to start using FEES with her breastfed post-op patients, her cardiac team asked for a literature review. She went looking and found almost nothing. So she and a multi-site team of cardiac SLPs, an aerodigestive chair, and a cardiac intensivist ran a survey of practice instead. What they found: 58% of responding centers are performing FEES in the CICU, 71% of those still prefer VFSS as their primary instrumental exam, and most are doing it without lesion-specific inclusion criteria or physiologic stopping parameters.

In this conversation, Karli breaks down why NICU feeding research doesn't transfer cleanly to term infants with cCHD, why aspiration risk shows up regardless of surgical STAT category or vocal fold mobility, how coupling FEES with the postoperative NPL could work (and where it gets complicated), and the research article on parental role alteration that changed the way she approaches every bedside. She also makes the case that you do not need a PhD to start collecting data on a clinical question you can't find the answer to.

Research source: Negrin K, Willette S, Godsil J, LaManna S, Garcia R, Morris K, Jones C, Morrow M, Wiscount J, Meyer-Macaulay C, Aaronson N, Reynolds J. Perioperative Management of Dysphagia Within the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit Utilizing Flexible Endoscopic Evaluation of Swallowing: A Survey of Practice. Am J Speech Lang Pathol. 2026 Mar 10;35(2):763-771. doi: 10.1044/2025_AJSLP-25-00100. Epub 2026 Feb 24. PMID: 41734216.

Show notes: https://syppodcast.com/409

On this episode of The Swallow Your Pride Podcast, Theresa Richard sits down with Lindsay Iser, M.S., CCC-SLP, Director of Clinical Specialty for Powerback Swallow Solutions, who leads one of the largest in-house mobile FEES programs in the country. Lindsay walks through how the program started with conversations before 2020, launched its first training in […]

The post 408 – Building Mobile FEES From the Inside: How One Company Trained Its Own Endoscopists appeared first on Swallow Your Pride Podcast.

On this episode of The Swallow Your Pride Podcast, Theresa sits down with Nicole Langton-Frost, CCC-SLP, BCS-S and Carey DeWalt, CCC-SLP from The Johns Hopkins Hospital to talk about something a lot of acute care SLPs have been told to skip: cognitive evaluation and treatment in the ICU. This conversation started because MedSLP Ed posted a question about whether cognitive rehab really has a place in acute care, and Nicole reached out to say her team wanted to weigh in.

Nicole Langton-Frost CCC-SLP, BCS-S and Carey DeWalt CCC-SLP walk through the research on multimodal sensory stimulation for patients with disorders of consciousness, the 2013 New England Journal of Medicine study showing 40% of ICU survivors still had cognitive function equivalent to a moderate TBI at three months, and a 2023 randomized controlled trial where just two 30-minute cognitive sessions a week produced significantly better cognitive scores. They also get specific about chart review: what head imaging tells you about cerebral small vessel disease and Fazekas scores, which lab values should make you postpone a standardized assessment, and how ejection fraction factors into cognitive risk. They cover which patients are and are not good candidates, why the answer is often compensatory strategies and caregiver training instead of restorative therapy, and how their department grew this practice one patient population at a time.

Get the show notes and references here: https://syppodcast.com/407

The post 407 – Cognitive Rehab Belongs in Acute Care: How One Hospital Built the Case Over 12 Years appeared first on 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.