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Billy.. Sorry to disillusion ya, but Parkie women lose elasticity in THEIR vocal cords just as frequently as men with PD do. It's simply more noticeable in men because they have deeper voices than women do... A PD woman who loses vocal quality does so with her voice merely becoming softer in tone, with the actual tone making no changes. There are several different ways that PD can affect speech.... the softening of sound, the problem with too much air leaking out of the vocal cords during speech causing words to come out chopped up and incomplete, (actually, feels ya have run OUT of air rather than too much - strange), the inability of being able to clearly enunciate words because of the muscles around the mouth and/or the tongue not responding quickly to form the individual words... I have the problem of too much air being pushed thru the vocal cords and have been exploring getting bovine collagen injections into the two vocal cords. I've been trying to get Kaiser Permanente to pick up the cost of this as I am a member of Kaiser, and this procedure IS covered by Medicare. IF I'm unsuccessful in getting Kaiser to do the injections, then I'm planning on having Dr. Berk at UCLA do them, which will put me out of pocket $500. For more information about collagen injections, check the List Archives for the complete review of discussion I attended hosted by my PD support group (Meeting in the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles, the last Sat. of every month, at 1:00 pm, Granada Hills Community Hospital, Granada Hills) <GREAT group of people!> (HINT HINT) <grin>, with the guest speaker being an associate of Dr. Berk's at UCLA. For those interested, Dr. Berk's phone number at UCLA is: (310) 206-6688 Barb Mallut [log in to unmask] -----Original Message----- From: Parkinson's Information Exchange On Behalf Of Heather Elizabeth Baird Sent: Friday, April 18, 1997 2:27 PM To: Multiple recipients of list PARKINSN Subject: Re: Collagen voice treatment Like, why is it, that it is always the men who lose their voices, it is never the women, eh? Billy Baird ([log in to unmask],ca)