Most clinicians spend a career going deep in one discipline. Megha Vansadia went back and earned a second license. In this episode of Coral Currents, I sat down with Megha — dually certified as both an occupational therapist and a speech-language pathologist — to talk about what it actually looks like to see a child through both lenses at the same time.
Megha started as an OT in 2005 and loved it, but kept bumping into the same feeling: she was missing something. "Either you let it go or you change it. Don't complain about it," she told me. "So I chose to change it." She went back to school for her master's in speech-language pathology in 2014, and that's when things started clicking into place.
What struck me most was how she talks about the overlap. Her OT brain reads a child's regulation, posture, and sensory needs in the middle of a speech session — knowing when to pause and let a kid spin or get squished before asking for more communication. "Regulation before expectation" isn't a slogan for her; it's just how she works. And the biggest surprise of her SLP training? Swallowing. "That was the biggest light bulb," she said — realizing how much of feeding is sensory and oral-motor, and how the two are tangled together.
She shared one story I keep thinking about: a client with cerebral palsy who was legally blind and deaf. Her whole rehab team chose the child's hands as her mode of communication, co-signing into her palms. But during transfers, when everyone's hands were occupied for safety, that channel disappeared. So Megha and the PT taught the same consistent signs on the child's back and waist — up, sit, two steps back — so she always understood what was being asked.
That's the kind of access an OT lens catches and a single discipline might miss entirely.We also talked honestly about where the two fields push against each other — AAC setups, feeding, fatigue — and what to do when providers disagree. Megha's answer is refreshingly grounded: bring both options to the family, try them, and see what works. "At the end of the day, we're all on the same team." Her real philosophy on collaboration is even simpler: "The day I'm an expert on something is the day I need to put my hat away."
And for anyone worried this is a story about one clinician being "better," it isn't. Megha is the first to say so. "Being dually certified doesn't make me more awesome or less awesome," she told me. "I'm just doing therapy, like you're doing yours." What she models instead is curiosity — the willingness to see a gap and do something about it, and to keep learning from every PT, OT, and SLP around her.
At Coral Care, that's exactly the kind of whole-child, deeply collaborative thinking we want to put in front of more providers. Whether you're an OT, an SLP, or a parent navigating both, this conversation will change how you think about treating the whole kid.
Listen to the full episode of Coral Currents with Megha Vansadia on Spotify.
