Breaking Down A Vocal Breakdown: Adele

For a young singer like Adele, there are few things worse than chronic vocal problems.  For the second time in the last year, she has had to cancel or reschedule tour dates due to vocal issues.  It almost becomes a pyramid of problems; from the artistic one of not being able to consistently re-create the vocal sound in concert that she created in the studio to the business/livelihood side of jobs and money (possibly millions of dollars) lost due to cancellations and a resultant mistrust of promoters and fan base alike who can never be sure if she's going to show up or not.
Add in the fact that, somewhere along the line, there have to be some well-respected Ear Nose Throat (ENT) doctors who would recommend surgery or "cutting the cords" (Elton John and Julie Andrews immediately come to mind); which becomes another awful decision to make, particularly when recovery takes more than a year -- or never.
I'm hardly anti-doctor, I'm probably more anti-cough drops, honey, lozenges, etc. used as "get-bys" for thrashed cords.
The human voice is a living instrument.  If the reed on your sax breaks, you don't just glue it together and keep playing.  That reed will never be the same.  Just like if a string breaks on your guitar, you don't stick a knot the middle, re-string it and keep plucking away.  Twist an ankle or sprain a ligament, stop running.
In rehabbing a voice (and, yeah, I've rehabbed quite a few of them over the years), it's best that the cords are put on complete rest so the body can recover.  If your career is at stake, you probably shouldn't even whisper.  You shouldn't vibrate the cords at all or try to "work around" your voice by speaking in a shallow manner.  Truly, silence is golden in vocal rehab for singers with damage.
After a few days, maybe even a few weeks, that's when rehab begins.
But it's not the voice that requires rehab, it's the body that requires vocal technique to support the voice.
Watch the interview and listen to Adele's speaking voice.  She's charming, speaks quickly, in long sentences, and has a tendency to breathe either shallowly or not at all before she starts speaking again.
Adele mentions that she recently gave up smoking --  which is something she loved to do.  Anybody who's familiar with the sound of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Ella, Billie, Etta, knows that smoking gives you a thicker, "gravelly" sound, which is cool for nightclubs, lounges and studio recording, but is hell to pay when the "industrial" job of singing comes up; sustaining a national tour.
So the first job is rest.
The next job for a belter like Adele is learning to breathe deeply, to the bottom of your lungs, not to the top of the collarbone.
After that, take the pressure off of your cords when you sing by putting more pressure in your back (press the ribs out when you breathe in) and expanding your breastplate out (the area right under where the ribs meet in front).  That's a deep breath.  Hang on to that air.
Now that the "roots of the tree" are taken care of, give the voice a pressurized exit out of the mouth by using a strong bite so there is a tightness, a flexed strength in the muscles of the jaw so the vocal cords can do their job and achieve different degrees of tension/tightness to hit a variety of pitches.
The body leads the voice.
And if the body commands enough energy, the voice will follow obediently.
It's the key to eight shows a week on Broadway, four to five hours a day in the studio or even six shows a day at a theme park.