Carmen Huston M.A., CCC/SLP

Owner/Provider

Carmen has over 30 years of experience providing therapy services across a variety of settings, from hospital acute care/NICU to outpatient clinics and home-based environments.  Over the years, Carmen has specialized in pediatric services, treating children with a variety of feeding disorders and early communication delays.  During her years working in hospital-based inpatient acute and outpatient clinics, she has treated a large variety of patients from newborns to school age with developmental to complex medical diagnoses affecting feeding and swallowing.  After starting Takes2Therapy in 2014, she began to specialize even more in treating infants and young children who are at risk of failure to thrive, who are already struggling to meet nutrition/hydration needs by mouth, who are at risk for supplemental tube feeds, or who are dependent on tube feeds due to limited oral-sensory feeding skills and are struggling to progress orally. Carmen investigated evidence-based research and collaborated closely with GI physicians to develop best practices to utilize Hunger Induction to accelerate and optimize progress towards oral intake.  Carmen utilizes Cue-Based Feeding and the S.O.S (Sensory-Oral-Sequential) approach to feeding to teach patients and families oral-sensory feeding skills and strategies to develop active, positive oral feeders.  Carmen's success lies in her ability to address all areas of your child's feeding issues; physiological, motor, sensory, and behavioral. Through parent education/coaching with highly individualized plans of care and close collaboration with patients' medical providers, Carmen has been highly successful at helping patients progress toward oral intake. 

Prior to starting Takes2Therapy, Carmen worked as a senior therapist/manager at Dell Children's Medical Center (DCMC), providing therapeutic services, managing the feeding team, and assisting in program development in both the inpatient hospital and clinical settings.  She was an integral part of developing DCMC’s feeding therapy programs, including NICU Cue-Based Feeding, Trach/Vent Clinic, the Aerodigestive Program, and initiating consultative feeding therapy services at Specially for Children pediatric GI services.  Carmen was able to continue to work closely with the Aerodigestive program as a PRN therapist, sharing her expertise and best practices to introduce and develop protocols for Feeding Tube Weaning, utilizing Hunger Induction, in the Aerodigestive Program. Carmen now devotes her time fully to Takes2Therapy, but continues to collaborate with physicians and clinics based on her long-lasting relationships and expertise.

Prior to moving to Austin, Carmen lived and worked in San Francisco, CA, working for California Pacific Medical Center and University of California San Francisco Medical Center. She was able to contribute to the development of the California Pacific Medical Center Kalmanovitz Child Development Center Feeding Clinic and was very fortunate to be able to benefit from direct consultation from Dr. Kay Toomey PhD., founder of the S.O.S (Sensory-Oral-Sequential) approach to feeding, who was hired to provide consultation and education to the clinic.  Carmen's experience in CA laid a developmental approach to feeding that she has now been able to combine with a more aggressive medical approach, using Hunger Induction Theory, to accelerate and optimize patient outcomes.

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Of note, Carmen is a native language Spanish speaker from Puerto Rico and can treat English and Spanish families.