STOPPING A PARKINSON'S TREMOR WITH MASSAGE THERAPY-short VERSION

Aspiration pneumonia is a severe danger for People with Parkinson’s, yet little has been explored in finding ways to decrease the anterior (front) neck muscle tension that could be contributing to reduced function of swallowing. When the muscles of speech become excessively tight, they can play a part of restricting vocal volume, projection and smoothness.

In my practice, I have found that the anterior neck muscles in People with Parkinson’s have become extremely restricted and hypertonic. This could easily be related to excessively contracting the neck muscles as a response to tremors, perhaps even to catch balance or to tense up with discomfort and frustration. In general, our neck and shoulder muscles seem to be a popular gathering place for tension from stress.

I have carefully developed muscle lengthening techniques that have been successful in improving vocal volume, projection and smoothness and reducing difficulty swallowing with many patients, consistently including People with Parkinson’s. I have been continuously improving and applying these techniques for the past few years and the results have been fantastic. 

We should not only be looking inside the voice box to help improve function in this region. There are dozens of accessible and palpable skeletal muscles involved in speech and swallowing. They respond to stretching just as any other muscles in the body respond to stretching. 

Time to sing outside the box!