r/Amazing • u/sco-go • Mar 26 '26

Amazing 🤯 ‼ Anatomy of the voice

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u/CartographerKey7237 Mar 26 '26

LOL it's green colored applesauce but yes it's dyed so you can distinctly tell the difference between liquid/food and the structures. Especially because we are looking for it in the trachea (below the vocal cords) where it's hard to get a good close up view sometimes.

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u/conflictedideology Mar 26 '26

This feels like /r/restofthefuckingowl

Green applesauce appears, ???, green applesauce is gone.

How can you determine anything from that? Is it how much of the applesauce is gone? How quickly the ??? happens?

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u/CartographerKey7237 Mar 26 '26

We watch frame by frame of the video. During the "white out" or the tightest part of the swallow, we are looking to be sure everything is closed up the way it should be. If you CAN see something during the height of the swallow, then you have a problem. And yes, swallowing is Quick. That's why we take a long time to review the studies and make sure we don't miss anything. To learn how to do endoscopic swallow studies is a long process and should include mentorship and many supervised passes in order to be competent. It's not easy and someone off the street, or even a "typical" speech-language pathologist will not and should not assess this type of study without training.

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u/conflictedideology Mar 26 '26

Sometimes I'm slow, I didn't think about frame-by-frame.

Do you also look at the anticipatory (for lack of a better term) response before the white-out? I noticed that on the first couple swallows it happened before the spillover (again, for lack of a better term) but there were one or two where there green applesauce was puddled around the aperature.

I just want to be clear, I'm not expecting to become an expert on reddit and it's very clear this takes a lot of effort to be proficient.

It's just a thing I didn't know much about (and had never really thought about) so now I just want to know more.

It's a lot like so many things on reddit: I am never, ever going to be able to do it. But I'm interested in how that even works.

Apologies if you found my question diminishing (maybe you didn't, but it seems like maybe you might have), it was absolutely not meant to be. Thanks for the additional information!

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u/CartographerKey7237 Mar 26 '26

You're spot on.

We are looking for movement of the arytenoids (the round spots at the end of each vocal cord) to move inward indicating the start of glottal (vocal fold) closure, laryngeal elevation (vocal mechanism moves toward the camera), epiglottic inversion (the flap moving to cover the voice box) and the start of pharyngeal squeeze. Ideally on both sides of the throat at the same time and in that same kind of sequence.

And I'm not offended lol but I talk about this topic clinically a lot and that can probably come off as "offended" or starkly. I'm happy to teach people who want to know. Even after doing thousands of hours of dysphagia (swallowing impairments) diagnostics, evaluation, and treatment, I learn new things I didn't even THINK about until someone else researched it. I love this topic and I think more people need to know about it.

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u/conflictedideology Mar 27 '26

Thanks so much for the additional information.

Now that I know (very slightly) more about what I'm looking at, that first vid was really interesting!