Rehabilitation for Aphasia at Boya Clinic

Aphasia is the loss of already acquired speech, or impaired comprehension of it, caused by damage to the brain's speech areas. This is exactly what sets it apart from other childhood speech impairments: the speech was there, the child was talking — and after an injury, a severe neuroinfection, a disturbance of cerebral blood flow, or surgery, they stopped. Sometimes speech output is affected: the child understands but cannot find the words. Sometimes comprehension is affected: words sound like a foreign language to them. Both can happen at once. For parents this is an abrupt and painful break, because there is something to compare it with.

It is important not to confuse aphasia with alalia: in alalia speech never formed in the first place — the child simply did not start talking on time. In aphasia speech was lost. The wording is determined by the neurologist from the medical report, but for planning rehabilitation something else matters more — what the level of speech was before the event and what remains now. Work begins with that comparison.

How the course is built at Boya

Boya Hospital (Yuncheng, Shanxi Province) admits such children as part of pediatric neurological rehabilitation. The course runs as an intensive: 6–9 sessions a day, 6 days a week. The core is daily speech therapy organized by levels: first the understanding of simple requests and names is restored, then the naming of objects and actions, then phrases and dialogue. If articulation was affected, breathing, voice, and the mouth muscles are worked on separately. Traditional Chinese Medicine methods run in parallel: scalp acupuncture — needling points on the head, used in Chinese medicine to activate the speech areas — along with acupuncture, pharmacopuncture, meridian point stimulation, and pediatric Tui Na massage. Since aphasia in children often comes together with the motor consequences of an injury, occupational therapy, exercise therapy, and apparatus-based physiotherapy are added so that everyday skills return alongside speech.

What matters for parents

Recovering speech after brain damage is a slow and uneven process: periods of visible progress alternate with plateaus. Promising a full return to the previous level would not be honest — the outcome depends on the extent of the damage, the child's age, and how early the sessions began. What is real is that a child's nervous system is plastic, and intact areas of the brain genuinely can take over part of the lost functions — given regular load. The recommended course is 2–3 months. Starting is simple: send hospital discharge summaries, reports from a neurologist and speech therapist, MRI images and EEG results, and describe what the level of speech was before the event. The document-based consultation is free, and there is no prepayment: you pay on site and only for what your child has actually received.