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  • Rehabilitation • Extended Care • Memory Support • Respite • Hopice

Homestead Rehabilitation Center

Compassionately Committed to Excellence in Customer Service

Your Neighbor in Care

4735 South 54th Street
Lincoln, NE 68516 • 402.488.0977

New Therapy Helps Swallowing Disorders

VitalStim Therapy is a breakthrough technology that helps retrain damaged throat muscles due to:

  • Stroke

  • Neurological Diseases

  • Aging

VITALSTIM THERAPY can help dysphagia patients swallow again.

Dysphagia—the inability to swallow—affects between 6 and 15 million adults. It is common after stroke, neurological diseases, head and neck cancer and aging. Traditional therapy for treating severe dysphagia has not been very effective. New therapy gives hope to swallowing solid foods again and improving the quality of living. VITALSTIM THERAPY is a non-invasive external electrical stimulation therapy that re-trains the throat muscles needed for swallowing. The electrical current emitted by the device causes the muscles responsible for a normal swallow response to contract.

VITALSTIM THERAPY works by retraining the throat muscles through electrical stimulation.

In patients with severe dysphagia, VITALSTIM THERAPY’S success rate in restoring patients’ swallowing function past the point of their requiring a feeding tube was 97.5%, versus 39% for thermal application.

VITALSTIM THERAPY can mean the difference of eating through a tube or eating solid foods again.

In well over one-third of these severe dysphagia cases, VITALSTIM THERAPY was able to restore the patient’s swallowing function completely, while not a single patient was restored to full function by means of thermal application.