Episode 285: Mini Myo with Hallie Bulkin, MA CCC-SLP, CMT®, COM

Hello friends and welcome to this episode of the Untethered Podcast. This is episode 285 and I wanted to jump into the topic of Minnie Mayo. Okay, a lot of you are constantly in my DMs going what is happening out there? Why are people calling the work that we do Mini Mayo? Undermining what we are licensed to do and providing services that are ultimately harming the pediatric feeding population and children who have airway disorder, you know, disorders just sleep disorder, breathing, obstructed airways, so on and so forth. So that's what we're going to dive into today. Let's get started. Quick Disclaimer all information, content and material of this podcast are the opinions of the speakers and is for the informational purpose only and not intended to serve as a substitute for the consultation, diagnosis and or medical treatment of of a qualified healthcare provider. Welcome to the Untethered Podcast. I am your host, Holly Vulcan. I'm a certified myofunctional therapist, feeding specialist, podcaster, business owner and mentor. This podcast is all about getting your questions answered and collaborating with colleagues to bring you the most up to date information in the orofacial myofunctional therapy, airway, tethered oral tissue and pediatric feeding therapy space. If you're new here, I challenge you to keep an open mind and join my mission to spread this message far and wide. If you've been around since since June 2019, thanks for being a loyal listener. As we jump into today's episode, remember to listen with correct oral rest posture, tongue up, lips closed, teeth apart, breathe through your nose. Let's get started. All right, so I think it's important to recognize one I I've talked about this topic quite a bit in the past and I don't expect this to be a super long episode. I really want this to be a very short information episode, one that is helpful to share far and wide because Mini Mayo is a made up marketing ploy for pediatric feeding therapy. If a child is not at the age of 4 year 4 or 5 years old, cognitively meaning like they cannot follow the directions of a four or five year old child regardless of how old they are or are not, then they are not appropriate for a traditional orofacial myofunctional therapy program. What do those programs work on? Well, if you know the goals of Mayo, you know what they work on. We work on lips closed, right? Tongue up, lips closed, teeth slightly apart, breathe through your nose. We're looking at correct oral rest posture. We're looking at what's happening in the oral cavity. Can we chew our foods properly and create a bolus, which is just your food mixed with saliva, so it's properly prepared to be swallowed and digested, you know, to move through your body as it's intended to. Can we properly prep that bolus through chewing? And can we get everything ready for the swallow process? Right. That is considered the first phase of the swallow, that whole bolus prep. Right. So that is really the biggest thing that MYO looks at, and I have a ton of resources on it. I've got a course, I've got a certification, I've got all kinds of. I've got a membership, the MYO membership. I've got all kinds of really helpful resources. You can go to Halibalkin.com, you can go to the blog, you can type in Mayo and pull up resources there as well. Right. So if you're looking for resources, they do exist, both on this podcast. You can go to the untethered podcast.com search, type in Mayo. You're going to get all kinds of, you know, amazing episodes on Mayo shared by both myself and other experts in this space. What I don't love and what I think is, really falls under the guise of medical misinformation, is when providers who are not skilled in or licensed in pediatric feeding therapy. So we're talking speech language pathologists, occupational therapists, and sometimes a physical therapist in the United States of America. Okay. I'm speaking specifically about licensure here in the US if. If this service, this mini mayo, is not being provided by them, then it is not mini MYO because it is a regulated area that requires a certain level of education and a license to perform this work in the mouth. If someone is doing a screening, if someone is doing, you know, and then referring to the right provider, that's a different story. Although screenings are technically still, they fall under the scope of assessment. And so screenings, you know, you have to be careful what you're teaching people to screen. When I teach my pediatric feeding screening, it's. It should really only be done by an SLP or OT or a student who is getting educated in this space, like in a graduate school program. Right. Because they're getting their master's, right? They're headed towards licensure. This is part of educating them. This is. That's very different than taking my very comprehensive screening that overlaps with even some like feeding assessment, feeding and swallowing assessment, and sharing that with somebody who's not trained in this. Okay. And I share that not to be. I'M not. Let me back up here. I'm not looking to like take away from anybody else or prevent anybody from getting proper services. What I'm trying to do is I'm trying to protect the public. I'm trying to protect the unknowing parents of children who bring their children to us after spending thousands of dollars on a mini my mini Mayo program somewhere else with a provider who's not properly licensed but who has been trained by someone else who is also not properly, properly licensed. Or maybe they've been trained by someone who is licensed but who should not be training people who are not properly licensed, if you follow me here. And the child is literally at square one a year into their so called mini Mile program. What I mean, stop the madness. I'm going to quote Kevin Leary here. Stop the madness. It's insane to me that people can sleep at night knowing that they're practicing without the proper licensure and potentially putting these children further back on the pendulum of our trajectory. Not pendulum, but trajectory of getting the proper help that they need. So when we call it Mini Myo and you're working with an SLP or ot, then that's different because they're basically taking what they've learned in, in their traditional myofunctional therapy training and they're adapting it through the lens of what they've been trained to do as a pediatric feeding therapist, swallowing therapist, because they have the right licensure to do that. We absolutely work on those same goals, but they fall under pediatric feeding therapy. Okay. And so mini Myo is basically a component of a pediatric feeding therapy approach and program a therapeutic intervention. It is therapy that we can bill on a super bill to medical insurance, whether we are in network or out of network. That requires somebody having the right license to do that. If it can't be. If a super bill cannot be given by somebody for that same service, it's because they're not licensed to provide it. And that should be a major wake up call to everybody. So please do not fall for marketing, please. I am an excellent marketer. I love marketing. I think marketing has a beautiful time and a place in all things. But also we need to be ethical. It is completely unethical to market something that you are not licensed to do simply because you've decided you want to help people. Okay, that's great. Go back and get the proper relationship to do so go through all of the same means that everybody else is doing. Right? You don't get to just. If I wanted to go do open heart surgery. I can't just go. I really want to help those people, so I'm just going to go perform open heart surgery. I mean, that sounds ridiculous, right? Like what, Allie, what are you saying? Yeah. So imagine how ridiculous it is that people are toying with swallowing, feeding and swallowing, which is one of the main functions that our bodies require to stay alive. We need to be able to eat and we need to be able to breathe, right? Breathe and then eat. And we're talking about both of these factors when it comes to a mini MYO program, because we're dealing with upper airway and we're dealing with chewing, swallowing, suck, swallow, breathe pattern in infants, being able to latch, you know, and so on and so forth. And there's other professionals involved, right? If you're working with an infant, then you're gonna. And they're breastfeeding, you're gonna pull in a la, you know, provider, whether that's ACLC or IBCLC or, you know what? There's all different kinds of credentials there. It's not what this episode is about. Right. You're going to pull them in for the lactation component and then you're. The feeding therapist is going to come in to work in the baby's mouth and work on the baby's feeding or, you know, the sensory, oral, motor feeding skills with the goals of MYO in mind. Because we're always looking at airway. Can they breathe through their nose? Is that why they're struggling to latch? Right. We need to be looking at that. Can they form the proper lip seal? Can they form a seal with their tongue around the breast or bottle nipple? Can they pump that milk out? Can they manage the suck, swallow, breathe pattern? Is the timing off what's happening? Right. Are they swallowing too much air? Is that distending their belly? Like, there's things that go beyond just the MYO side, the mini MYO side of things, and then transitioning to solids. A lot of these kids may struggle with that. Why? Because they don't have the proper sensory, oral motor skills. And those are assessed and treated by a pediatric feeding therapist that has a licensure as an slp, ot and sometimes, as I mentioned, PT in the United States of America, at least. Okay, so I want to make this super clear and I wanted to dedicate an entire episode to this topic. And because there is so much information out there and it's really hard to sift through who to listen to, what to believe. I'm telling you, you want to listen to those who have the proper licensure to start. Okay, that doesn't mean they're the best, but they at least need to have the right license. So if someone's talking about MYO and adapting MYO to a pediatric feeding program, that's awesome. And as long as they have an slp, OT or PT designation after their name, because that demonstrates that they're licensed. And you can look up people's licensures too, you can look up names and see if they're licensed in your state. Because everyone has to be licensed in the state, not only where we are practicing ourselves, but where you also live. So that's another key indicator. If you're working with somebody who lives in a different country or state than you do, you got to make sure, I mean it's really on them to make sure of this. But you also can check this, that they are licensed in their state and they are licensed in your state. Just a little, little tip that said, we do have a ever growing list of pediatric feeding therapists. If you go to pediatricfeedingtherapist.com we do have a directory. We also from a mile standpoint, if your child's over the age of four, we just launched like brand new launch. So there's not gonna be too many people on it yet. But we just launched our. The Mayo. I think it's the Mayo directory dot com, the MYO directory dot com. We just pointed the URL to it like yesterday. So yes, that is the correct URL. So there are some providers up. There is a couple of pages of individuals. Now these people are people who have specifically taken my Mayo course. Some of them have become certified. Not they don't have to be certified to be on the list, but they do have to have taken the myo method course and that is teaching your traditional myo over the age of four. The people who are on the pediatric feed feedingtherapist.com directory are those who have taken feed the peds. And you have to be either an slp, OT or a student in one of those professions to take that course and add yourself to the directory. So you know that anybody on that directory is going to be a safe bet, right? They're going to have proper licensure as long as they're maintaining their license. So you can check that on your end, but you shouldn't have to. Like I said, that is the medical professional's job to maintain that and to update themselves on directories. But anyways, I hope this is helpful. Helpful. I wanted to provide this information and some resources because at the end of the day, the goal is to, in my, in my world, is to protect the children and to protect you from a lot of predatory business marketing employees that are out there that are unethical. And we want to make sure that your child is getting the right care and that your time and resources, money wise, time wise, everything is going towards the right place, towards a place where you can actually get help from your child, from someone who is licensed to help them. So that is that. As always, if you can't find somebody on the directory, feel free to reach out to me on Instagram at Hallie Balkan and I'm always happy to check our networks and see if we can find somebody in your area. All right, everybody, have a great week. This is Hallie signing off. Thanks for listening to this podcast. If you found value in this episode and want to hear more of these Myotots, Airway and Feeding related episodes, be sure to leave a review on Apple Podcasts and and share this episode on your social media platforms. You can access free resources and all I offer@halliebulcan.com or pop over to Allybulcan on Instagram to get all the latest updates.