Stop Doing the Same Tongue Exercises for Months!

Myotherapy should not become a never-ending collection of exercises with no clear functional endpoint. Here's the thing, a patient should not be doing suction holds, the same suction holds 6 months later while everyone vaguely says like, we're still working on lingual strength and range of motion. Okay, what is that activity preparing the patient to do? What function are you trying to change? What does mastery look like? When are you going to increase the complexity? When are you going to reduce cueing? When will you move from this isolated movement into Functional tasks inside feeding, swallowing, speech, right? And when will you know the patient's ready for discharge? Like, your treatment plan needs a beginning, a progression, and an endpoint. And that doesn't mean every patient completes therapy in the same number of sessions because that doesn't happen, right? Readiness differs, medical and structural factors differ, home carryover differs, the complexity of the case and what's involved and who's involved and what else is needed, that all differs. But there should always be a clinical reason that treatment is continuing. We choose an intervention because our assessment told us what the patient needs. Then we measure whether it changed function.