Weeks 1-2 · meta · dysphonia red-flag intake
Clear five safety flags before you take on vocal load.
The checklist
pass: every item clear
Five yes/no items from the AAO-HNS dysphonia guideline. Emerald ✓ = clear, rose ✗ = flagged. This isn’t a percentage score — a single flag pauses practice and routes you to an ENT. The illustration shows one flagged item (pain on phonation) to make that gating logic concrete.
Before you start
Answer each item honestly. None of this leaves your browser. If anything flags, you’ll get a short next-steps panel (book an ENT, hold off on heavy load) and the practice path stays gated until you re-run and clear. This is the only screen in the curriculum where the right answer is sometimes “stop.”
When to use this screen.Once at the start of the program, and again any time something changes — a cold that didn’t clear, lingering hoarseness, voice loss, new pain. The American Academy of Otolaryngology dysphonia clinical practice guideline (Stachler et al. 2018) identifies a small set of symptoms that warrant a clinician visit before structured voice training; this screen is a direct translation of that guideline into a 5-item intake.
Why every item must be clear. A percentage score would be wrong for this kind of screen — singing through pain or persistent hoarseness can convert a treatable irritation into a chronic injury. The cost of a false negative (missing a real flag) is much higher than the cost of a false positive (pausing practice for a clinician visit that came back clean). The screen is conservative by design.
Why this is the first node.Every subsequent lesson assumes a healthy voice. Alignment-and-release, speaking-center, hum-onset, silent-breath-hiss — all of them add load. Running this screen first prevents the entire curriculum from quietly making something worse. Single attempt; pass means you’re cleared and the rest of the program unlocks.
Session ahead
5 yes/no items · single attempt · every item must be clear to promote.