Helping Parkinson’s Patients Regain and Retain Speech with Samantha Elandary
Samantha Elandary has worked exclusively with individuals diagnosed with Parkinson’s and related disorders since 1999, and for our first episode of 2026, she joins the show to talk with James about her work. She is the founder of the Parkinson Voice Project, and she shares how she built a non-profit from her kitchen table, explains the difference between speaking with intent versus automatic speech, and gives some tips for those who are starting their own disability-focused business.
Contact Mai Ling: MLC at mailingchan.com
Contact James: James at slptransitions.com
Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Since 1999, Samantha Elandary has worked exclusively with individuals diagnosed with Parkinson’s and related disorders. She has devoted her life to making quality speech therapy accessible to this patient population.
Early in her speech-language pathology career, Elandary recognized individuals with Parkinson’s responded remarkably well to speech therapy and vocal exercise, but they struggled to retain their improvements. Patients who had the capability to improve were losing their voices, ending up on feeding tubes, and dying of aspiration pneumonia. Although the medical community attributed this to the progressive, degenerative nature of the disease, Elandary recognized this was not the biggest problem.
People with Parkinson’s were losing their speech and swallowing abilities because they would complete formal speech therapy and then stop their speech exercises. With Parkinson’s, speech exercise can never stop. People with Parkinson’s need a lifetime of speech therapy combined with daily home practice.
With compassion and determination, Elandary set out to develop a comprehensive speech therapy program that would improve speech and swallowing AND provide the motivation her patients needed to “stay the course.”
Elandary originally treated patients in her home. In 2005, Elandary founded Texas Voice Project for Parkinson Disease, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping people with Parkinson’s regain and retain their speech and swallowing. The SPEAK OUT! Therapy Program was developed in 2010. The name of the organization changed to Pa…Read More