Avoiding Negative Dysphagia Outcomes.

Dysphagia in adults affects their quality of life and can lead to life-threatening conditions. The authors draw on both 30 years of experience as clinicians and also on expert testimony in adult, dysphagia-malpractice cases to make five recommendations with the aim of preventing dysphagia-related deaths. They discuss the importance of informed consent documents and suggest the following nursing actions to reduce these often unnecessary tragedies: consider the importance of diet status; understand and follow speech-language-pathologists' recommendations; be familiar with the dysphagia assessment; be responsive to the need for an instrumental assessment; and ensure dysphagia communication is accurate and disseminated among healthcare professionals.

Lessons from nursing home dysphagia malpractice litigation.

The purpose of this article is to review the management of swallowing disorders in nursing home patients. The goal is to provide readers with five areas of contentious dysphagia management issues that have surfaced in several malpractice litigation cases. A detailed examination of what went wrong in the management of these patients' dysphagia from the perspective of the plaintiffs' dysphagia expert witness, as well as a discussion of what nursing home staff could have done to prevent these tragedies, is presented.

A redefining Wernicke's area: receptive language and discourse semantics.

This report calls for a more exacting definition of Wernicke's area in the discipline of communication sciences and disorders to reflect an accurate view of brain functioning with regard to decoding discourse semantics. Conventional definitions are provided to delineate the general usages of important terms used by many professional dictionaries and glossaries when defining Wernicke's area, receptive aphasia, understanding, and comprehension. Five levels of semantic decoding are described.

Eclectic perspectives on the psychology of aphasia.

This article explores the psychological changes that occur in patients who have suffered a stroke with resulting aphasia and examines the adjustments necessary to help the patient cope. The eclectic approach described in this paper examines the psychology of aphasia from three perspectives: effects of brain injury, psychological defenses and coping styles, and responses to loss. Depression, anxiety attacks, ego restriction, crying, euphoria, denial, anger, and a host of other psychological reactions can accompany stroke, sometimes causing health care personnel to feel overwhelmed by these psychological concomitants in their patients.