402 – Bigger Fish to Fry: Why Our Field’s Fixation on Aspiration Is Costing Patients More Than We Realize with Dr. Debra Suiter

On this episode of The Swallow Your Pride Podcast, Theresa sits down with Debra Suiter, PhD, CCC-SLP, BCS-S, F-ASHA — Director of the Voice and Swallow Clinic and Professor at the University of Kentucky — for a conversation that started as a personal text and turned into something the entire field needs to hear. Both Theresa and Dr. Suiter found themselves navigating hospitalizations for close family members at the same time, and what they witnessed from the family side of the bedside was deeply troubling: an overemphasis on aspiration risk, no shared decision making, no informed consent, and interventions that caused measurable harm in the name of preventing it. They discuss the Langmore 1998 paper, John Ashford's three pillars of aspiration pneumonia, why waivers are coercive, how documentation protects you, and how SLPs can use risk management and ethics committees to change practice patterns from the inside out. This one is personal. It's also clinical. And it's long overdue.

Get the informed consent bundle here: https://go.medslpcollective.com/informedconsentbundle

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