Episode 290: Choosing a Trained Therapist with Hallie Bulkin, MA CCC-SLP, CMT®, CPFT™

Hi and welcome to episode 290 of the Untethered Podcast. This is your host, Hallie Balkan. And I cannot believe we are 10 episodes away from 300 episodes. That is wild to me. We will actually cross the 300 mark this year. Wow. Okay. Right. If I'm doing math correctly. Yeah, I think we will. Anyways, so I want to talk to you this week on today's episode about choosing the right orofacial myofunctional therapist. Like how I get this question all the time. How do I know who to choose? How do I know who's best for me or my child? And there's a lot of things that play into this. Right. But I just wanted to give you like a few tips today. So let's jump in, let's talk about those. But of course, really quick. Before we do that, I have to let you know that if you're listening to this during the week of October 21st, the Myome membership.com has now opened its doors. Five, five days only. Come and join us. This is your online study club. So if you are a therapist, then this is more geared towards you. Slp, otpt, rdh, dental colleagues. You are all welcome to join the MYO membership. We are your study club where you're going to get 3 1/2 hours of new content every month. 2 hour presentation from a colleague in the space related to Miro Airway Tots are a related area relevant to our our specialty arena. And then you're going to get an hour and a half of study club where we have different people presenting cases. We're talking about cases. So sometimes there's one person, sometimes there there's two. Either way it is going to be lots of new amazing content. Plus you get access to all the old content too. You've got access to a library of research reviews, marketing materials. So many tools in there, just endless tools. We've got bonus CEUs. So right now when you join, you'll have access to a free supervision CEU, which I know SLPs that that is something that we have to have now. You'll also get ethics and DEI CEUs access to those as well. So tons of good stuff in there. I'm probably forgetting some really important. Like we have weekly office hours. We have a 24.7Q and a private group which everyone says is their most favorite part of the membership. I'm sure I'm forgetting many other things, but I just wanted to share. This is available to therapists that are looking to either just dip their toes in Maybe you're an experienced and advanced therapist looking to collaborate with colleagues on cases and just like learn all things myo airway tots. Whatever it is you're seeking in the MYO space, this is the community for you. So go and join us. The myomembership.com doors close in five days. If you're listening to this on October 21st, they close on October 25th. So jump in, join us. Canceled. Wait to see you in there. The other thing I want to mention is that we do have a Mile Directory. The MILE directory is now available and so if you go to the myo directory.com we do have people still adding themselves. It is brand new, so if you're looking for a therapist, you can definitely go there, but just know that people are still adding themselves. We have a small group of people on there with more to come, but you can definitely check and see if anybody, uh, that has taken our course, it's see if they've added themselves to the MY directory yet. If they are certified in the certification that we offer, they will also. That will appear as well. But as I've mentioned, you don't have to be certified to be a great myotherapist, so we want to just point that out. Those who are certified are pinpointed though, if that is important to you. Okay, let's get started for real this time. 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 a qualified healthcare provider. Welcome to the Untethered Podcast. I am your host, Hallie Balkan. I'm a certified myofunctional therapist, feeding specialist, podcaster, business owner and mentor. This podcast is also 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 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. And everything. But experience does become equally important. And so if you are new, it's okay to say to somebody like, hey, I'm new. You know, at Mayo. Look, when I started I literally had my notes from my course sitting in front of me with the first family I worked with. They were actually waiting for me to come back, so this was much easier. They were waiting for me to come back and get started. But I remember, like sitting there with my notes and being like, hold on a second. And kind of like reading some stuff that I'd written down, being like, oh, okay, yeah, okay, great. And then basically just trying to get my hands on as many faces in that first week. I did eight MYO assessments my first week back from my initial course because I wanted to start to feel what was going on on these faces and understand what may be more typical or what may need to be addressed. Right. And so by doing that, I very quickly started to get more experience, Right? So I'm not talking about, like, experience by number of years, because there's people who've been in the year who've been in the field 30 years, and maybe they've treated 10 Milo cases where there's people who've been in the field for a year and they've treated a thousand myo cases. Maybe not a thousand, let's say 200. You get the point though, right? You understand that what I'm saying is, like, you've been able to treat a lot more case wise at a younger age because it's your specialty versus someone who's not specialized in it, who maybe just kind of dabbled in it over time, right? So I'm not saying that number of years. And don't, don't, like, check my math. Math is not always my strong suit, guys. Like, if it's not mathing, like, it's fine. You get my, you get the point I was making, right? So I'm sitting here going, okay, maybe 200 is not realistic. Like, that seems like a lot too. It might be that they've treated, you know, 40. I don't know people still a lot. That's a lot. If, like, all they're doing is myo or they're just doing myo and feeding. Like, in my practice, we've got therapists that specialize in pediatric feeding and oro patient myofunctional therapy across the lifespan. And so that's who they're seeing all day, every day. And if they're seeing 28 patients a week, then 28 times the number of people that, you know, some people go through therapy in 12 weeks, some people go through it in a year. Right. That can impact how many people you see in a year. Right. That's why my math Wasn't math and. But you get, you get my point. Now that experience starts to build, and it can build early and young. So when I say this, I say, I'm saying, look for people who very clearly promote that they do this therapy and they have the licensure to do it, okay? Because those are the people who specialize, even if they've only been doing it for a couple of years or they're new, right? If they're new and they have somebody like, for example, in my practice, I've got a couple of new therapists, but they're already out there and they're coming back to me, like within their first year of doing mayo. And they're coming back to me, like, wanting to discuss cases. I'm like, you have nailed everything. Like, you hit the nail on the head with everything you just said to me. I actually have, like, like I don't have anything else to add to this. Like, you're doing exactly what I would be doing. And I think that that's phenomenal because that speaks to their ability to be mentored and learn, right? And we discuss cases and they've learned from past cases and now they're applying what they've learned to new cases without having to come back to me. But at the same time, when they were new, they had me as a mentor, right? And that's something that we offer in my MYO membership, is we offer the mentorship that so many seek that many tell us they cannot find so that you can get started with patients and that, you know, if you have a myotherapist that you work with, I'm talking to, you know, now non therapists or parents of kids, maybe you are a therapist, but someone's working with your child who's like kind of looking for that community and for people to bounce cases off of, bounce questions off of that is what the MY membership offers. That's a big, big piece of the MY membership. Okay? So we've talked about, obviously, licensure. We've talked about experience, specialization. I also think that the treatment approach and the way in which somebody is taught to do MYO matters because there's some courses out there that teach very cookbook, cookie cutter. Everybody goes through a 12 week program. Everybody starts with this exercise and they move to this exercise and then they do that exercise. And I'm here to tell you, no, that is not how it works. And if like you've got two kids going through therapy and they're doing the exact same thing. No, just no, it's not how it works. So we need to be learning what we're doing, why we're doing it, what muscle group are we working on and why? That is something that I teach. You know, why are we addressing these things that way you can pick and choose what that patient needs to work on and their therapy will be very tailored to their needs, not just some like 12 week cookbook program, because those don't work. I can't tell you how many people have spent thousands of dollars and have gone through these 12 week, quote unquote myo programs where everybody's kind of prescribed the same thing week. And then they're frustrated because it looks like they've never had mayo a day in their life. And they land in my practice or some of my colleagues practices and they're frustrated. And we're frustrated for them because they have now been sold a program that didn't do anything for them. It was not individualized. It was cookie cutter. It was just somebody taught them that they need to do. Day one, you do this. Day 10, you do that. No, that's not how mayo works. We are human. We are not robots. So the treatment approach matters. And it's really, really important that you find out before investing if, if someone starts, if someone's using language, like 12 week program, 10 week program, that should be a red flag to you. Like you should be on high alert that this is probably cookie cutter. Because a true therapist who's doing MYO cannot tell you how many weeks it might take you to graduate from your mile program. We have to assess you first. We have to understand what we're working on. We have to know, like, younger children may take longer because some of what we're asking to do is more advanced. And if they're cognitively intact at like, as a four year old or older, then most of the time they're appropriate for a mile. Sometimes age 5 is more appropriate than 4 cognitively. Meaning, like they can follow directions of a 5 year old or a 4 year old at minimum, then you know, it might take them longer because it's more challenging versus an adult who might move through faster because it clicks faster. What we're asking you to do now, I'm not saying wait till the kid is older. That's not the solution. We want to address it now. But there are some kids where it might take four months and other kids where it might take a year. We don't know that we, we don't have a crystal ball. We cannot just assume based on the evaluation either that Your child is going to take X number of months or weeks to complete this. It depends how they respond. It depends how good, how, how. I said how good you are doing homework, but that is really what I wanted to say. So I'm just going to say it. How good and consistent you are at doing your homework. Like, are you doing it? Are you not doing the homework that we give you? Because those who do the homework move through a lot faster. And so if your goal is to move through faster, do the homework that your therapist gives you. Okay, thank you. But the treatment approach really does matter. Okay. And so some of the other things that I will say as I wrap this up, I can do another episode on, like, how to pick the right course for you. Because I get a lot of therapists asking me, like, what's the difference between this and that? And how do you pick the right course and all that fun stuff? It's more so about being able to take a course where you leave and you understand, as I said, how to assess and how to make sense of what you found and how to. There's a lot of information. I'm making it sound super simple. There's a lot that goes into understanding that and then also understanding, like, where to start in therapy and how to continue therapy and why you're treating something and why something presented the way it did and what muscle groups are involved and how that impacts function and how everything is interconnected. So many courses out there don't teach people this stuff. It's very, like I said, kind of cookie cutter. And, you know, people want to condense things and make things faster. So, like, in my. In my own course, I did try to do that, but I always say it's like, without the fluff. Like, I'm not going to just add hours to have it be a certain length. I'm going to teach you what you need to know, everything you need to know to go out and do this successfully. And I was just looking, and I think it's incredible because we have not, like, truly done, like, a big marketing push on this course. We're, like, starting that now on my MYO Method course. Like, you probably don't hear me talk about that that often on here. You hear me talk more about my Feed the peds course or the MYO membership. You know, once in a while I might mention the myo method. Like, of course, I announced back in 2021 when I released it and I mentioned that I was going to do it and all that fun stuff. Um, but I've had over like 450 upwards of, you know, it's over 450. I don't remember the exact number right now. People purchase that course and go through it and complete it. And what's really cool is it's all been by word of mouth. And it really got me excited last week because someone said to me, oh, yeah, well, I bought your course because that was like the top course recommended in this Facebook Facebook group. I was asking like, what my courses people were taking. And you know, people were saying, oh, take Hallie's, you know, my own method. Because it actually teaches you how, like, you understand what you're doing, you understand how to assess, you understand how to treat, you understand what to do with your patients. And I was like, oh, thank goodness. Like, that was my goal. My goal is to take the information out there to simplify it for you. It's not revolutionary information. I did not make it up. But what I did was I took all the information out there and I put it into a pretty package and I made it digestible by different, you know, for different learning styles. Plus, you get lifetime access to my courses. So anywho, my goal was not to talk about that today, but I wanted to go there for a second. So I will dive in a little bit more on the next episode and talk a bit more about, like, which course to take, how to pick a course, and with also the understanding that I'm a course creator and then even like some of the differences between the certifications out there because I get those questions a lot. So stay tuned for that one next week. But for right now, the doors to the mile membership are open. So go to the myomembership.com and join us. We cannot wait to see you in there. For now, this is Holly 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@halleblin.com or pop over to Allybulcan on Instagram to get all the latest updates.