Feeding therapist Hallie Bulkin explains that feeding difficulties involve motor, sensory, behavioral, family, and airway factors working together. Clinicians often add more interventions thinking it speeds progress, but excessive treatment creates sensory noise and worsens outcomes. The skill most training neglects: deciding which factor to address first.
Motor affects sensory, sensory affects behavior, behavior affects family dynamics, airway affects endurance, and it's all intertwined. But most of your training, right? Most of the training out there taught you like what feeding problems look like. It did not teach you how to decide what matters most first. That is a completely different skill. So when everything feels important, it becomes very hard to choose or know where to start. And here's a trap that so many clinicians like fall into, and I know this from speaking to so many of you on like one-to-one calls lately. I hear people say like, "If I work on more things, I'm assuming progress is gonna happen faster." It sounds logical, but let me tell you, feeding doesn't respond well to volume, okay? More treatment, more strategies, that does not automatically mean better outcomes. Sometimes it just creates noise and upsets nervous systems and actually decreases outcomes.
What I Was Missing in Feeding Therapy: ARFID, Airway, and Myo with Samy Hernandez
