Introduction

Abstract

For most professionals or student professionals who are engaged in caring for individuals who present themselves for help, for diagnosis, or for re-training of the voice as this relates to a particular problem in function of the voice, the need for surgery on a patient’s vocal tract should represent failure. There are, of course, a multitude of conditions, situations, circumstances, many of them benign ones as well, over which neither the attendant professional team nor the patient has any etiologic control. People cannot, after all, choose their parentage nor their genetic make-up, and they certainly have no directional say over the vagaries of an embryologic accident occurring previous to their birth. But for many of the problems which beset the vocal tract and which then interfere with its adequate, its appropriate or its ideal functioning, surgery represents the end stage in an ability properly to treat, to diagnose, or even, to cope. In the management of patients with vocal problems there should ideally be a team: a team consisting of a good speech therapist-diagnostician who maintains close rapport with the patient, an involved laryngologist who has his wits about him and his diagnostic acumen sharpened, plus a strongly motivated patient who comprehends his participation in the overall scheme of things as well as his diagnosis and prognosis. This team, then, ought to do fairly well with the satisfactory management, with the satisfactory solution of problems besetting the subject, with most of the more common voice disorders.