To view this page ensure that Adobe Flash Player version 11.1.0 or greater is installed.
Above: Dr. Gerald Berke: “Your
voice is how you express yourself
to others. If it’s compromised, it
impairs your personality and how
you interact with the world, which
can be overwhelmingly frustrating.”
Opposite Page: Dr. Dinesh Chhetri:
“This center is unmatched in its
combination of clinical care and
research to advance the knowledge
of these disorders, making a huge
difference in patients’ quality of life.”
20 U MAGAZINE
His move to China made the problem markedly
worse. “Work demands and trying to speak a new
language aggravated all my vocal problems. It came
to a head at a meeting where I was called on to
speak to about 250 people,” he says. “My voice was
horrible, cracking and missing words. I wanted to
crawl away and hide.”
Clearly something had to be done. Laurence,
who was trained as an engineer, methodically
scoured the latest medical research on SD and
took a week’s vacation in New York to confer
with specialists. That’s when he learned about
otolaryngologist Gerald Berke, MD (RES ’80, ’84),
chair of the Department of Head and Neck Surgery,
and UCLA’s Voice Center for Medicine and the Arts.
At UCLA, Dr. Berke performs a specialized surgery
that severs the nerve pathway between the brain and
vocal cord and grafts a new nerve from the neck. It
essentially rewires the larynx. The alternative for
Laurence would have been Botox injections that
usually correct the symptoms for about six months.
But a Botox injection when he was younger left
Laurence with only a whisper of a voice for two
months, “which was miserable. So I was wary of
the injections. I wanted a permanent solution.”
FOR PATIENTS WHO HAVE BAFFLING
PROBLEMS with talking, breathing, singing
or swallowing, the UCLA Voice Center for
Medicine and the Arts can be an oasis in a
desert of inconclusive tests, endless doctors’
appointments and despair. The 10-year-old
center flows from the life’s work of its founder,
Dr. Berke, who is an international authority on the
physiology of the larynx. “Your voice is how you
express yourself to others,” Dr. Berke says.
“If it’s compromised, it impairs your personality
and how you interact with the world, which can
be overwhelmingly frustrating.”
In addition to patients like Laurence, world-
class singers such as Celine Dion and John Mayer
have made their way to Dr. Berke for help with their
ailing vocal instruments and then been public in
their support of his work. “Through his medical
care, I learned that the voice is an instrument ...
and nobody sees that as delicately and carefully
as Dr. Berke and his colleagues at UCLA,” Mayer
told an audience in January 2014 at a fundraising
gala to benefit the Department of Head and Neck
Surgery. Many other entertainers who have trekked
to the center’s understated facilities in one of UCLA
Health’s outpatient offices prefer to keep quiet about
any problems with their voices.
The Voice Center for Medicine and the Arts is
known for novel treatments for such disorders as
vocal-cord paralysis, airway stenosis and the SD
surgery that Laurence underwent. In-office laser
therapy, digital-video endoscopes and minimally
invasive approaches are used to treat myriad
complex and common disorders of the larynx
and trachea. Dr. Berke started the center in 2004
with Bruce Gerratt, PhD, a speech and language
pathologist who consults on all Dr. Berke’s patients,
and Dinesh Chhetri, MD ’97 (RES ’03, FEL ’05), an
otolaryngologist who specializes in swallowing
disorders. The younger generation of physicians at
the center now includes otolaryngologists Jennifer
Long, MD (RES ’10, FEL ’11), PhD, who joined the
practice four years ago, and Abie Mendelsohn, MD
’06 (RES ’11, FEL ’11), who joined in 2012.
For Laurence, the surgery itself was swift and
without significant pain, but his long-term recovery
process proved to be more difficult. Three weeks
after his surgical procedure in Los Angeles, he