So Parkinson’s is a progressive neurological disorder that involves a loss of the neurotransmitter dopamine, and dopamine is responsible for coordinating and controlling movement. So people with Parkinson’s will often have a lot of challenges with, smooth and coordinated control of their movements. Up to ninety percent of people with Parkinson’s have a motor speech disorder, which is called dysarthria, And what happens is, people will have a soft or monotone voice, they may, have a disrupted rate of speech, or imprecise articulation, and this all results in a reduced communicative effectiveness, which then results in a sort of a withdrawal from life participation, which leads to social isolation. About ninety thousand Americans are diagnosed annually, and there’s an estimated one million people living with Parkinson’s. It was very gradual, but it was years ago that I started to realize that I had to speak up more because my voice was becoming softer and softer. People say, oh Parkinson’s, that’s a shaking disease, but there are so many other things that people aren’t aware of under the covers because Parkinson’s is systemic, systemic disease. It can affect almost every, any nerve or muscle in your body. Actually, the core of the Speak Out program is learning how to speak with intent. And speaking with intent just means speaking deliberately, purposefully, thinking about how you’re saying what you’re saying. So a typical speak out therapy session would, involve two of our Northeastern graduate students in speech language pathology, who are being supervised by a certified and licensed speech language pathologist a meeting with, one of our patients. That can be done in person here at our clinic on the Boston campus, or we do this as well over Zoom. Actually, lot of our participants choose to do Zoom because it is, very convenient, and for people who may have mobility issues or transportation issues, that’s really important to them. Our goal is to give them that confidence back and that ability to feel like they’re communicating more effectively than maybe before they started the program. We really want to support not only, you know, their vocal quality and their overall voice, but also just their mental health and their and their, like I said, their confidence as well. Every single one of the grad students, if I didn’t know they were grad students, I would think they were seasoned professionals who have been doing this for ten or twenty years. It’s not just therapy, it’s social. I guess that’s the thing. It’s a social group. It’s all about focus. What am I gonna say and can I say it loud enough so that people don’t have to say, Excuse me, could you repeat that? Was how quickly you can see the change in someone and how much more positive they feel about themselves and speaking to others and speaking in general, really. It’s a great thing to see that over only three to four weeks that we’re able to help them really alter their voice can be like night and day, which is wonderful. It’s really quite a gift that we’re able to provide the speech therapy services to every resident of Massachusetts who needs it at no cost to them. And this is through a generous grant from Parkinson Voice Project who developed the Speak Out Therapy program. We’re also able to run, pretty much year long groups. They’re weekly groups that we run. They’re actually called the Speak Out Class, and everyone who goes through our program, then transitions into a weekly group. The work that we’re doing here at the Speak Out Therapy and Research Center has real world outcomes for people. It is helping them communicate in an effective way in their daily lives no matter who they’re talking to or what they’re doing. And research has shown that people who seek out the Speak Out therapy program earlier in the disease process actually have better outcomes, and Speak Out can mediate the progression of speech and voice decline. I have to take my dogs for a walk in the woods every day. Their names are Rowan and Emmy and I will call Rowan here, Emmy here and I don’t have an instructor to tell me now say it again with more intent but that’s what happens. I usually call and I get no response and then I have to use more intent. This is how I get my daily practice and that gives me a lot of joy. I’d say just try it, you’ll try it, you’ll like it.