How Laryngeal Massage Helps Treat Muscle Tension Dysphonia
Overview:
This post explores the clinical application of laryngeal massage in treating muscle tension dysphonia (MTD)—one of the most common causes of chronic voice issues. It also explains how MTD develops and why manual therapy is part of a multi-pronged treatment plan.
Key Points:
What MTD is: causes, symptoms, and prevalence
How muscular imbalance and overcompensation affect vocal quality
Why massage helps reset muscular patterns
Integrating massage with voice therapy, straw phonation, and breath work
Success stories or case studies from the Center for Vocal Health
Muscle tension dysphonia is diagnosed when voice symptoms are due to muscular tightness or inefficiency. The voice functions under athletic conditions like most other systems - with frequent muscular tightness, ligament soreness, and achiness. Singers note loss of range while other professional voice users may notice voice fatigue, difficulty projecting their voice, or throat pain. Muscular and ligamentous symptoms are universal in vocal athletes, making laryngeal massage a vital component of their vocal optimization.
The voice box is suspended in the neck by a series of muscular and ligamentous connections. By activating muscles, the brain positions the vocal cords and throat muscles into the correct alignment to produce the desired sound.
Just like any athletic task, there can be mistakes (a missed shot in basketball is like a missed note in singing). There can also be inefficiencies that still produce the desired outcome (a middle C or a sunk shot) but with inefficient muscle use. In basketball, this may look like landing too hard after a jump shot or leaning in way that strains the back muscles rather than the glutes. These inefficiencies are more likely to happen as the body fatigues. In the voice, this may look like tongue tension or throat squeezing and can become a habit once engaged during a period of overuse or fatigue. This would be considered muscle tension dysphonia.
In basketball or other sports, repositioning and optimizing is best done with a physical therapist. In voice, the same concept applies, where a voice therapist will use a combination of strategies to encourage optimal voice engagement. One critical technique is laryngeal massage (also referred to as voice massage). After assessing where imbalances exist, the therapist will manually release those areas. They will also reverse engineer the process that led to inappropriate muscular engagement by finding strategies to prevent fatigue and improve endurance.
Laryngeal massage is one of the tools in the toolbox of a laryngologist or voice therapist to treat the muscular imbalances that occur in every vocal athlete.
