Rehabilitation for Drooling at Boya Clinic

Drooling is a common and very everyday problem: saliva escapes from the mouth constantly or in episodes, especially when the child is focused on play, speaking, or moving. Wet clothes, irritated skin around the mouth, the need to keep tissues and a spare shirt at hand — all of this makes an ordinary day noticeably harder. Parents also worry about how others react: drooling is often the first thing strangers notice.

It is important to understand that the child produces roughly as much saliva as their peers. The problem is control — weak lip and tongue muscles, an open mouth, rare and poorly coordinated swallows, reduced sensitivity around the mouth. This pattern is typical in cerebral palsy and other consequences of nervous system damage, and it usually comes together with chewing difficulties, choking, and unclear speech: they all share the same oral motor base. Boya Hospital (Yuncheng, Shanxi Province) works with such children as part of its core specialization — pediatric neurological rehabilitation. The course runs intensively: 6–9 sessions a day, 6 days a week. At its center is daily speech therapy with oral motor exercises; alongside it run pediatric Tui Na massage, acupuncture and scalp acupuncture, pharmacopuncture, meridian point stimulation, and apparatus-based physiotherapy.

The work targets muscles, not glands

The logic of the program is simple: teach the mouth to close and the swallow to happen on time. The speech therapist trains lip closure, tongue mobility and strength, sensitivity inside the mouth, and the rhythm of swallowing; Tui Na massage and acupuncture help regulate the tone of the face and neck muscles; apparatus-based physiotherapy supports the muscles between sessions. Head and body position get separate attention: when the head is lowered or tilted, saliva escapes faster than the child manages to swallow it. That is why the work on postural control done in exercise therapy and occupational therapy helps here as well.

What matters for parents

Drooling is not a "bad habit" or carelessness on the child's part — it is a functional feature that can be worked with. The honest goal of the course is to reduce the leakage noticeably and make the child's day more comfortable, not to guarantee that drooling will vanish entirely. Progress is tracked over time: how often the child swallows on their own, how dry their clothes stay, whether the resting position of the mouth has changed. Parents continue many of the exercises at home — the specialist demonstrates them right during the session. Getting started is simple: send your child's documents. The document-based consultation is free, and there is no prepayment: you pay on site and only for what your child has actually received.