Support for this program is provided by the Weldon F Osborne Foundation.

The Schillhahn-Huskey Foundation.

And viewers like you.

Thank you.

On today's show well feature one nonprofit offering audiology, speech, occupational and physical therapy services, and another that serves autistic individuals of all ages.

Stay with us.

Welcome to Chattanooga Stronger Together.

I'm Barbara Marter.

Joining us today is Taylor Bostwick, executive director of the Speech and Hearing Center.

Their services improves quality of life through better communication.

Welcome, Taylor.

I'm so glad you're here with us today.

And I'm interested to learn more about the Speech and Hearing Center.

So kind of tell me about what the mission and vision is, the mission of the Speech and Hearing Center.

So as the only local nonprofit focused on speech and hearing, we strive to improve quality of life through better communication for people of all ages, regardless of circumstances.

So we envision a Chattanooga in which everyone can hear, be heard and communicate clearly.

I love that.

So all ages.

What?

What's the youngest that you will work with?

So we call it twinkles to wrinkles.

We actually do the newborn hearing screenings at Parkridge.

So some of our patients are less than 24 hours old, and then we have patients that are over 100.

So is that a widespread I mean, do we have a problem with speech and hearing?

I don't really know that much about it.

So do we have a problem with it?

Yes, we do.

So the American Speech Hearing Language Association estimates that 10% of Americans have a speech or hearing impairment, or you could call it a communication disorder.

And so if you correlate that to Hamilton County, we're talking about 37,000 people.

my gosh.

Yeah, it's a big chunk and it's a big chunk of people who can't live their life to the fullest unless they have some type of intervention.

And so what is your service area?

So we are the only nonprofit that focuses on communication disorders in this region.

We go in a 250 mile radius, 18 counties, and we serve 15,000 people per year.

my gosh.

Serving them with what?

What services do you provide?

So we provide audiology and we provide speech language pathology.

So those are what's in our name, speech and hearing.

But we have a lot of things that branch off of that.

So like I said, we do newborns hearing, screening.

We have a mobile unit that goes and tests the hearing of workers in manufacturing environments.

I saw that.

I love that.

And so that is an OSHA mandate that every 365 days, every manufacturer, if they have 80 decibels or above of noise in their facility, they have to test every one of their workers in that environment to make sure that their environment is not damaging their hearing loss.

But beyond speech and hearing services, we also offer occupational therapy and physical therapy, and those are the only two services that are not twinkles to wrinkles.

They are just for kids.

0 to 18.

And because as you can imagine, the setup for occupational therapy and physical therapy is very different for kids versus adults.

And we added on those services a couple of years ago because we found that many kids who had need speech therapy or one type of therapy need multiples.

And so instead of parents having to drive all over town to get all the services that their child needs, they can just walk right across the hall.

Wow.

Okay.

So for a teenager, what would be occupational?

What does that mean?

Refer to?

So occupational therapy is activities of daily living.

So it's anything that is in their way preventing them from living just a day to day life.

So it might be something like handwriting if they're having difficulty with handwriting and they don't have legible handwriting, that's an activity of daily living.

Or it could be.

A lot of our patients are on the autism spectrum, so it could be an aversion to textures or an aversion to light or an aversion to sound, something that's getting in their way of them being able to live their daily life.

And so you have programs that will help address those issues.

Once you determine what the issue is, then you have procedures or plans or programs to walk that student through and everything.

Yes.

Yeah.

So how do how do you get referrals?

Is it just through your website, phone calls, schools?

I mean, how do you get people to come to you?

So we do have some school contracts.

We are actually in CGLA and the Montessori Elementary at Highland Park, so we do speech therapy there, but most of our referrals come from physicians.

So if a physician identifies that a child has a developmental delay or speech delay some type of speech problem, or if they identify hearing loss, then they'll send them our way.

And then once they're said to you, then you start doing that full assessment to determine what's the issue, what's the problem, what are the underlying causes, And then you can prescribe a plan Yes, a treatment of care.

So all the way from diagnosis to that treatment plan and meeting their goals.

Okay, So do you do off site work or does everybody have to come to your office?

So like I said, we're in Parkridge East with the newborn screenings and we've got that mobile unit and then we're in the schools.

We also do daycare screenings, so we go around to daycares in the area and do hearing and speech screenings for little ones to make sure that there are no deficits there that need to be addressed early.

Because we've we know that the sooner you get to a child, the better.

Early intervention, really, before age three, you have the best chance of mitigating more negative effects down the line.

So if there was an other hearing problem, what would be kind of like a plan treatment plan for hearing?

So the only treatment for hearing is a hearing aid.

yeah.

But hearing aids are not the ugly things that you stick in your ears.

Theyre not.

Theyre not.

So these days there are many different types of hearing aids and there are some that are completely in the canal with just a little slim, translucent wire and a little unit that goes on the back of your ear.

I've worn them before, and no one could tell that I was wearing them.

so are do you determine if a cochlear implant needs to be made or.

We do not do cochlear mapping.

Okay.

Yeah, we would refer out to Vanderbilt for that, but you can determine at what level that patient is a hearing loss.

Right?

So when we do an evaluation, we can tell what decibels they can and can't hear and how severe their hearing loss is and what type of hearing loss they have.

And that's how they're prescribed.

Which hearing aid would be best for them and which technology level, because there are different levels of hearing aids.

Okay.

So you have a young child, say five or six finally comes in, parents realize and they get a hearing aid.

Do they outgrow that hearing aid?

Okay.

Yeah.

So ear molds a lot of times are made for children.

And so the the hearing aid is made from a mold and impression of the inside of the ear.

And so, of course, kids are growing constantly.

And so they have to come in over and over to get those ear molds redone so that they're hearing eight fits.

So I would not have thought about that because when you're in TV and everything, you know, you just have one size fits.

All right, use the earplug and everything.

So I hadn't thought about that, but that does make a lot of sense.

And okay, so twinkles to wrinkles.

Yeah.

How do you get I mean, do people just wait until they start developing a hearing problem as they get older and then they'll come in to you and then they might need it because we do have a hearing problem because as we were younger, you know, we were listening to loud music.

I mean, I look at my grandchildren now, they're in their teens and they're you know, they've got the earphones in or whatever, and they're listening to it so loud that I can hear it.

You know, they've got the radio in the car going, you know, they're on their their phones constantly and whatever that's got to do some kind of damage.

So they're going to be looking at an issue down the road somewhere.

So as our generation is aging out, there's going to be more and more, like you said, what was it, 15,000 patients a year?

That's only going to grow as our our our people grow as they get older.

So as baby boomers age, we're going to see a huge boom in in hearing loss and an untreated hearing loss, which untreated hearing loss is scary because they have proven that it leads to an increased risk of falls and an increased risk of dementia.

And so we create we get people into hearing devices and honestly, it's not a lot of times a voluntary thing where someone just recognizes that they're not hearing as well and come in.

It's a family member or it's a doctor or someone who's noticed, you know, that they're isolating themselves because they can't hear.

They're tired of saying what over and over again, they can't hear in busy restaurants.

And so it leads kind of down that slippery slope of social isolation to depression, to dementia.

And so a lot of times hearing loss is sneaky.

So you don't really realize what you're losing as you're losing it.

And so a lot of times when we fit patients with hearing aids, they cry because they hear things that they didn't realize they had lost you.

Most, most often you lose the high decibel frequencies first, so they'll hear hear their grandchildren's voice or they'll hear birds sing.

I hear that a lot is I forgot what it sounded like for birds to sing.

And so it's it's a sneaky thing that gets taken away from you over time and you learn to compensate.

And and it's not until it gets, you know, really bad or a family member or someone approaches you and says, you know, you've got the TV on 90 and and you really have to get in your right there in front of it.

Yeah, I know.

Very briefly in a minute or two that we have left, talk about the speech.

What's the therapy for speech?

Speech therapy looks a lot like play.

So my son has been in speech therapy on and off for the past two years.

And it depends on the age range.

My son is three, but it is a lot of play based therapy.

And so there is an observation room and each of our rooms.

So parents sit in the observation room and then the therapy takes place inside of the office of the speech therapist.

And then we have a two way mirror so that parents can observe and see what's going on here.

The lessons take them home with them.

So you're not just getting 30 minutes of therapy a week.

Your parents can the parents can carry that on and help them throughout their entire week with whatever they're struggling with.

This is fascinating.

Taylor, thank you so much for coming in.

Thank you for having me.

This has been very educational for me.

So thank you.

I appreciate that.

And up next, we will have Dave Buck with Chattanooga Autism Center joining us.

So stay tuned.

We want to know how you serve your community.

Send us photos or videos of you or your family volunteering, and we may feature it on a future episode.

Email stronger at WTCITV dot org or use the hashtag stronger WTCI on social media.

Welcome back.

Dave Buck is with us.

He is executive director of the Chattanooga Autism Center.

This organization provides support and services for autistic individuals and their families.

The center also uses their resources to build inclusion and acceptance.

Welcome, Dave.

I'm so glad you're here with us today.

And I am so interested to learn more about the Chattanooga Autism Center.

And I really want us to educate our viewers, too.

So I'm going to turn it over to you and ask you, how did this get started?

Well, first, thanks for having me.

And yeah, it's fun to talk about the origins of the Autism Center.

So if you remember back in 2008 to 2009, there was the team evaluation center.

Yeah, they're doing evaluations and providing all kinds of services for people with disabilities.

Well, there were clinicians who would walk in the waiting room and hear these parents talking to each other, sharing stories, but also complaining about there's just not enough services for the autism families.

So those clinicians got that group together, asked them what would you love to have in Chattanooga?

All of this great information.

But those clinicians weren't going to have the time then to build anything.

They're working 50, 60 hours a week.

So that's when I helped facilitate those parent discussions.

And we just came up with all of these different ideas and started putting some of them into practice.

So basically, was it you guys putting everything together?

It was the parents.

It was, you know, there had a need for this and they weren't finding those services anywhere else.

And so basically they brought it to you.

So give me an example, example of how some of them got created.

Sure.

I mean, it's all of them being together.

I mean, it started with what did they want?

They wanted education.

They wanted more information for parents and getting together.

So we started off with workshops that were provided by professionals, for free for parents.

We'd start getting 30 or 40 people coming to those, and the parents said we should have a conference.

So we all worked together to find different professional speakers.

Let's get people coming.

We had eight professional talks all lined up for parents and clinicians to go to and we hope to all that's hopefully 40 or so people to come.

We had the we hit the fire code at the Chattanooga Read house.

Then 200 people showed up.

We had to turn people away.

You could see there was this huge demand, but it was all of these parents doing all of the planning and putting everything together.

Yeah, that's how it got started.

That's amazing that parents were so frustrated that the services weren't there and like and enough of them got together saying, We've got to build this.

And then.

So that's how you got the Chattanooga Autism Center.

This is a a medium for them to help do that.

I know that we had talked earlier about the I think it's the Scott Kramer story.

I think that's an example.

So there's there's so many examples.

All of the programs, if someone wanted something to happen, there wasn't some big company that could make it happen.

It had to be parents.

But it wasn't just parents.

It were it was advocates.

So Scott Kramer was an autistic adult, was diagnosed in his forties, and he looks around Chattanooga back then and there wasn't anything for him.

So he starts his own social and support group as part of this Chattanooga Autism Center program that wasn't funded.

We're all these parents and people like him doing this ourselves.

So he would have regular meetings and autistic individuals would come and talk about what's going on.

They would do social events, all of these different kinds of things.

Scott Kramer did so much.

He passed away in 2019.

He had cancer.

And but the thing was, he had a mentor, all these people underneath him.

And so now it's still up and running.

It's still bigger than it ever was.

They have a conference now because he mentored these folks who took his place, and it's autistic individuals running the program.

So it's by and for autistic people.

wow.

And that's just one example.

There's so many other examples of families deciding to do something and building programs.

That's amazing.

That is really amazing.

So what programs do you actually offer?

And so that's changed over the years.

It just depends on who's available to do things and what the demands are.

And sometimes it has to do with funding and other times with being able to find professionals.

But some examples are a counseling center.

So we provide mental health counseling for autistic individuals.

We also have a clinic for younger kids who might need a lot more services, a lot more needs.

Maybe they run away or they might have severe meltdowns and behavior problems and getting kicked out of child care situations.

They need to be prepared for the world, for kindergarten, and also learn how to be self advocates.

You build independency so they can guide themselves.

So we have an entire clinic for ages 2 to 8.

But that counseling center, that's for teens, adults, we have people 50, 60 years old who are getting counseling through that music therapy.

We have a...

Here's another example Spanish speaking mom doesn't have any resources in the region.

This is way back then.

And she learns about autism and she talks to other Spanish speaking families who really need that information in Spanish.

She develops a Spanish language outreach program where she has people get together, where they're comfortable speaking the same language, finding resources and getting support being heard.

And so that's something that she has built over the years.

And it's, again, still going to the point where she puts the Spanish language, tracks in the conference and we have Spanish speaking people getting information sometimes for the first time.

Wow.

That is it's amazing that people are coming and bringing the programs because they see a need and the needs not being addressed.

So you really are a center like a resource center for them.

So if somebody one of the things I know when we had talked earlier, you use the word differences and not deficits.

When you talk about autism, which I, I love that because we're all different.

We all have different differences, as they say.

But how does someone detect who is autistic?

it's a wide ranging thing.

I'll try to really summarize.

It's there's going to be communication differences in all autistic people.

That's part of the diagnosis.

There are differences in repetitive behaviors or special interest differences in the ability to take the perspective of another person or interpret their their motivation.

Also differences, life and sensory differences.

So yeah, I'm glad you picked up on We talk about differences.

Often it's focus on the deficits, but really autism and neurodiversity is being different, wired differently.

And what we found over the years of talking to autistic individuals and the research is showing that, yeah, there's higher rates of depression or anxiety and other mental health issues, but it's not because of the autism, it's because of individuals around them not understanding that you are talking different than me or maybe processing things or your approach to things is different.

Might have different needs.

And once people become more understanding and accepting, then those individuals all of a sudden have a relief.

They're not having to mask and try to act like someone who they're not.

And so then the I wouldn't say completely melts away, but you see a huge reduction in depression and anxiety once you have this acceptance.

So that's that's why we really focus on people being different as well as focusing on the strengths.

Right.

So so how are some ways that we can or you can educate the community on the conferences or training sessions or just the get togethers and stuff like that?

How do we teach the audience about how right?

So if that's our goal is to build inclusion and acceptance, we do need to be doing a lot of training.

So we'll get the conferences.

Now there's 600 people that go to these conferences, teachers and and parents.

But we'll get calls from businesses or organizations like clinics or schools, law enforcement, child care centers.

Just a huge range of people will call us to come in and talk about autism so they have a better understanding.

And we will do that.

But we'll also bring autistic individuals to facilitate so that people have can ask questions from someone with lived experience.

we go out of our way to hire autistic interns or counselors or staff.

When we have the chance.

You know, someone has the qualifications and they're neurodivergent, yes, and we definitely have my my officemate or person next to me is autistic.

So, yeah, well, I did go to your conference earlier this year, and one of the things that I found so interesting was sitting in there and going to the different breakouts sessions and then sitting at different tables and talking to them, I found that the audience that was there, those 600 participants, they were parents, they were teachers, they were counselors, and they all were connected with we need help or we need more counseling or we need more research or we need more information.

But we also need to know that we're not alone.

We and I love how that some of the trainers out there were talking.

You are not alone, you know, and people were just taking notes and they were kind of looking each other smiling like, yes, we've got this, you know, because they're the ones having to deal with this every day.

Those parents had the right idea in the beginning getting folks together.

And so, of course, that's going to expand.

It's a bummer that that's only once a year.

So the other ways that people get connected is the resource hub.

We were always taking phone calls and emails from people asking questions about autism and we didn't know how many and we started putting all that information online on our website.

So we have all of these categories of where do you get an assessment, where do you get therapy?

What if you need help in schools?

And there are over a hundred different resources on there just from this region.

And so we get we thought we were getting maybe three or 400 calls a year.

It's more like 700 800 or more calls and emails a year.

So that's where we realize we're being a help people in the moment who need how do I get connected with this?

What do I do?

Am I autistic or is my child autistic?

Or we need help with the schools.

That's one of the biggest things that we do every single day.

And it's fun to train interns and volunteers on that.

And they are gaining that experience too.

Yeah.

So you mentioned interns.

So you use interns.

Where do you get the interns?

And then what are the skill sets or qualification that you're looking for?

And this is so important for us because the reason why we're not growing as fast as we could is we need more staff and more professionals in this area.

So we love working with UT, Chatt State, Southern, Lee, any colleges who want to send their social workers or psychologists or maybe people who like to work in nonprofits, they come to us and we teach them about not just teach them about autism related resources.

They get to sit in on training or sit in on clinical sessions or autism assessments, but they also get to meet and work with autistic individuals and families and really learn what the community is about.

That's the biggest takeaway.

And so they're going to be that much more ready to serve this population.

That's what we need, right.

And if they decide that this is where the heart is and they really want to do it, they can continue on and there's different levels of degrees they can go after, right?

Yeah, so many.

And that's a good point, too.

So someone might come and intern and realize, okay, I learned a lot, this is good, but maybe this isn't the career for me.

They still got exposure to the autism community that will never leave them.

But then some might go on to be social workers, some might be clinical social workers, clinical psychologist.

We need more of those therapists and counselors who are affirming of autism strengths and not trying to change someone into something they're not.

So yeah, those are many of the careers and there's there's several others be board certified behavior analysts.

So we need more of those these days as well.

So many things we and we've been watching that girl.

We have interns who become staff, who become supervisors, who become clinicians.

That's really neat to see over the time.

Yeah, I love that.

I have so much.

Thank you so much for coming in today.

I have learned more about Chattanooga Autism Center, and I really hope that our viewers have learned more, too.

And in they don't know where to go, call the resource center, go to your website.

Huge amount of information there.

So but thank you so much for coming in today.

Thank you for having us.

Appreciate it.

Okay.

And thank you for joining us today.

For viewers like you who want to make a difference in our community, we hope that Chattanooga Stronger Together offers a fresh perspective.

So let us know what you think.

Email us at stronger@ WTCITV.org or use the hashtag stronger WTCI on social media.

I'm Barbara Marter.

We'll see you next time.

Support for this program is provided by the Weldon F Osborne Foundation.

The Schillhahn-Huskey Foundation.

And viewers like you.

Thank you.

We actually do the newborn hearing screenings at Parker G. So some of our patients are less than 24 hours old, and then we have patients that are over 100.

So how would how would the hospital know if if a patient newborn has a hearing problem, they're not crying or they're what we do the testing.

So that's how they would know.

We come in with an ABR test and hook them up to electrodes and make sure that all of the anatomy is there for them to be hearing.

And that's a state mandated program.

I don't know that.

that's pretty cool.

So is that a widespread I mean, do we have a problem with speech and hearing?

I don't really know that much about it.

So do we have a problem with it?

Yes, we do.

So the American Speech Hearing Language Association estimates that 10% of Americans have a speech or hearing impairment, or you could call it a communication disorder.

And so if you correlate that to Hamilton County, we're talking about 37,000 people.

my gosh.

Yeah, it's a big chunk and it's a big chunk of people who can't live their life to the fullest unless they have some type of intervention.

And so what is your service area?

So we are the only nonprofit that focuses on communication disorders in this region.

We go in a 250 mile radius, 18 counties, and we serve 15,000 people per year.

my gosh.

Serving them with what?

What services do you provide?

So we provide audiology and we provide speech language pathology.

So those are what's in our name, speech and hearing.

But we have a lot of things that branch off of that.

So like I said, we do newborns hearing, screening.

We have a mobile unit that goes and tests the hearing of workers in manufacturing environments.

I saw that.

I love that.

And so that is an OSHA mandate that every 365 days, every manufacturer, if they have 80 decibels or above of noise in their facility, they have to test every one of their workers in that environment to make sure that their environment is not damaging their hearing loss.

And so is the speech and hearing.

The only one that's qualified to do that or provides that services that you're aware of where the local company that does that.

So there are some national players.

So for manufacturers who have national presence, they usually go with a national company, but we're able to offer local follow up.

So for people who fail their original tests or who miss their testing day, they can come in and see our audiologist here in Chattanooga.

And so that's kind of the differentiator we have there of being the local provider.

But beyond speech and hearing services, we also offer occupational therapy and physical therapy, and those are the only two services that are not twinkles to wrinkles.

They are just for kids.

0 to 18.

And because as you can imagine, the setup for occupational therapy and physical therapy is very different for kids versus adults.

And we added on those services a couple of years ago because we found that many kids who had need speech therapy or one type of therapy need multiples.

And so instead of parents having to drive all over town to get all the services that their child needs, they can just walk right across the hall.

Wow.

Okay.

So for a teenager, what would be occupational?

What does that mean?

Refer to?

So occupational therapy is activities of daily living.

So it's anything that is in their way preventing them from living just a day to day life.

So it might be something like handwriting if they're having difficulty with handwriting and they don't have legible handwriting, that's an activity of daily living.

Or it could be.

A lot of our patients are on the autism spectrum, so it could be an aversion to textures or an aversion to light or an aversion to sound, something that's getting in their way of them being able to live their daily life.

And so you have programs that will help address those issues.

Once you determine what the issue is, then you have procedures or plans or programs to walk that student through and everything.

Yes.

Yeah.

So how do how do you get referrals?

Is it just through your website, phone calls, schools?

I mean, how do you get people to come to you?

So we do have some school contracts.

We are actually in LA and the Montessori Elementary at Highland Park, so we do speech therapy there, but most of our referrals come from physicians.

So if a physician identifies that a child has a developmental delay or speech delay some type of speech problem, or if they identify hearing loss, then they'll send them our way.

And then once they're said to you, then you start doing that full assessment to determine what's the issue, what's the problem, what are the underlying causes, And then you can prescribe a plan of surgery for them of care.

So all the way from diagnosis to that treatment plan and meeting their goals.

Okay, So do you do off site work or does everybody have to come to your office?

So like I said, we're in Park Ridge East with the newborn screenings and we've got that mobile unit and then we're in the schools.

We also do daycare screenings, so we go around to daycares in the area and do hearing and speech screenings for little ones to make sure that there are no deficits there that need to be addressed early.

Because we've we know that the sooner you get to a child, the better.

Early intervention, really, before age three, you have the best chance of mitigating more negative effects down the line.

So if there was an other hearing problem, what would be kind of like a plan treatment plan for hearing?

So the only treatment for hearing is a hearing aid.

yeah.

But hearing aids are not the ugly things that you stick in your ears.

no, not the right.

So these days there are many different types of hearing aids and there are some that are completely in the canal with just a little slim, translucent wire and a little unit that goes on the back of your ear.

I've worn them before, and no one could tell that I was wearing them.

so are do you determine if a cochlear implant needs to be made or.

We do not do cochlear mapping.

Okay.

Yeah, we would refer out to Vanderbilt for that, but you can determine at what level that patient is a hearing loss.

Right?

So when we do an evaluation, we can tell what decibels they can and can't hear and how severe their hearing loss is and what type of hearing loss they have.

And that's how they're prescribed.

IVD Which hearing aid would be best for them and which technology level, because there are different levels of hearing aids.

Okay.

So of a young child, they five or six finally comes in, parents realize and they get a hearing aid.

Do they outgrow that hearing aid?

Okay.

Yeah.

So ear molds a lot of times are made for children.

And so the the hearing aid is made from a mold and impression of the inside of the ear.

And so, of course, kids are growing constantly.

And so they have to come in over and over to get those ear molds redone so that they're hearing eight fits.

So I would not have thought about that because when you're in TV and everything, you know, you just have one size fits.

All right, use the earplug and everything.

So I hadn't thought about that, but that does make a lot of sense.

And okay, so twinkles to wrinkles.

Yeah.

How do you get I mean, do people just wait until they start developing a hearing problem as they get older and then they'll come in to you and then they might need it because not everyone is diagnosed at early age with a hearing problem.

But at some point down the road we might have a hit to the head, a damage, something that could cause our hearing loss or partial hearing loss.

And so you can diagnose that and determine what kind of hearing aid or appliance that they would need.

Yes.

So we can see we can diagnose adults.

I have just lost my place.

That's okay.

So as sorry we got lost in your question and then I start over.

Thank you, little buddy Trail.

But that's okay.

No, that's fine.

That's fine, because I think it's so interesting because as we age, as the generation ages out, we do have a hearing problem because as we were younger, you know, we were listening to loud music.

I mean, I look at my grandchildren now, they're in their teens and they're you know, they've got the earphones in or whatever, and they're listening to it so loud that I can hear it.

You know, they've got the radio in the car going, you know, they're on their their phones constantly and whatever that's got to do some kind of damage.

So they're going to be looking at an issue down the road somewhere.

So as our generation is aging out, there's going to be more and more, like you said, what was it, 15,000 patients a year?

That's only going to grow as our our our people grow as they get older.

So as baby boomers age, we're going to see a huge boom in in hearing loss and an untreated hearing loss, which untreated hearing loss is scary because they have proven that it leads to an increased risk of falls and an increased risk of dementia.

And so we create we get people into hearing devices and honestly, it's not a lot of times a voluntary thing where someone just recognizes that they're not hearing as well and come in.

It's a family member or it's a doctor or someone who's noticed, you know, that they're isolating themselves because they can't hear.

They're tired of saying what over and over again, they can't hear in busy restaurants.

And so it leads kind of down that slippery slope of social isolation to depression, to dementia.

And so a lot of times hearing loss is sneaky.

So you don't really realize what you're losing as you're losing it.

And so a lot of times when we fit patients with hearing aids, they cry because they hear things that they didn't realize they had lost you.

Most, most often you lose the high decibel frequencies first, so they'll hear hear their grandchildren's voice or they'll hear birds sing.

I hear that a lot is I forgot what it sounded like for birds to sing.

And so it's it's a sneaky thing that gets taken away from you over time and you learn to compensate.

And and it's not until it gets, you know, really bad or a family member or someone approaches you and says, you know, you've got the TV on 90 and and you really have to get in your right there in front of it.

Yeah, I know.

Very briefly in a minute or two that we have left, talk about the speech.

What's the therapy for speech?

Speech therapy looks a lot like play.

So my son has been in speech therapy on and off for the past two years.

And it depends on the age range.

My son is three, but it is a lot of play based therapy.

And so there is an observation room and each of our rooms.

So parents sit in the observation room and then the therapy takes place inside of the office of the speech therapist.

And then we have a two way mirror so that parents can observe and see what's going on here.

The lessons take them home with them.

So you're not just getting 30 minutes of therapy a week.

Your parents can the parents can carry that on and help them throughout their entire week with whatever they're struggling with.

This is fascinating.

Taylor, thank you so much for coming in.

Thank you for having me.

This has been very educational for me.

So thank you.

I appreciate that.