Pre-Assessment Guide

This guide provides important information to know before your initial appointment. Please read through each section carefully to best prepare for the questions at your comprehensive assessment.

Breathing:

Take note if you or your child tend to breathe through your nose or mouth throughout the day. Check in at times of rest to see if the lips are sealed or not.

TEST: Can you breathe through your nose, without breaking lip seal, for three minutes?

Sleep:

Do you or your child snore, gasp or grind your teeth? Any obvious breathing or sleep disturbances. You can take pictures or videos, best taken around 1.5 hours into sleep

You can also use SnoreLab (a free app that monitors and reports on snoring through the night) to get some insight into their snoring habits.

Oral Habits:

Note any chewing preferences, such as favoring one side, or issues with texture, temperature or swallowing.

Any oral habits? Thumb sucking, biting nails and chewing pens are more obvious, but sometimes we don't realize other habits exist - like biting cheeks or chewing the tongue.

Tongue Position:

At any given moment, where is the tongue position? Does it rest on the floor of the mouth?

Suctioned to the roof of the mouth?

Pressed against the teeth?

This question is the one most people cannot answer without doing self check-ins prior to the appointment to determine where the tongue is resting.

*Young children sometimes don't have enough awareness to answer this question, but you can still ask and see what they say!

Your Appointment:

The initial assessment will include a comprehensive intake of information; including health history, photos/videos, measurements and protocols to evaluate the need for therapy and if there are any other specialists we may refer you to for supporting care. The appointment takes 45-90 minutes.

Baggy clothing limits how well we can evaluate posture and asymmetries, so loose or bulky-fitting clothing is not recommended.

We may assess how you or your child chew and swallow at the initial appointment:

- In-person assessments: We will provide bottled water poured into a plastic cup to evaluate your swallow pattern. We have pretzels or almonds available for the chewing part of the evaluation, but if you have any food allergies or aversions please have a crunchy food item, like crackers or pretzels.

- Virtual assessments: Please have a clear glass or cup of water and a crunchy food item (like crackers or pretzels) with you at your assessment.

✱ Because this assessment may cover complex topics that can be difficult to explain to those who are not present, we recommend that all individuals responsible for medical and financial decisions attend this appointment.

✱✱ We are a fee-for-service practice and do not submit to insurance and are unable to provide coding for insurance submission.