Unlocking the Secrets of Craniofacial Asymmetry With Dr. Timothy Adams

Hi everybody. I'm Dr. Sanda Moldovan, periodontist and nutritionist. Welcome to the Holistic Dentistry Podcast, the show that gives you the tips and tools to detoxify your mouth for a healthier body as we explore together the root cause of disease. Remember, you're not healthy until your mouth is healthy. So take care of it in the most Hi everyone. Welcome to another episode on the Holistic Dentistry Show. I'm your host, Dr. Sanda, integrative periodontist and nutritionist. And today we're going to be talking about craniofacial asymmetry. And why might you want to know about that? Well, because it is important in TMJ, vertigo, pressure behind the eyes, blurred vision, cervical neck issues. POTS, headaches, and so much more. And today I have a very special guest, Dr. Timothy Adams, who has been practicing as a dentist for over 35 years and now mostly looking into craniofacial asymmetry. So, Dr. Adams, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Sanda. I appreciate it. It's great to be here.

Yeah, I'm excited to really dive into this topic because you are very rare. Not a lot of dentists focus on this. And I know you have a very special technique that I want to dive into. But first, and you know, you have a private practice now. Yes, I do.

I do.

In Carmel.

Carmel, Indiana. Indianapolis, Carmel.

Indianapolis. And we're going to put the information for your practice down in the show notes.

Great.

And I know there's got to be a story behind what you do. And I know your dental journey started as a child with injuries.

Yes.

So

playing sports, stupid jock stuff, but I got hit playing hockey and baseball 3 different times, front teeth. And I had a dentist that was very impactful and really me getting into dentistry. And every time I go in his office, he was happy, laughing. And I thought, man, I want to do this. It's kind of cool. So he was very influential in getting me interested in dentistry. So early on, 10, 11, 12, I just wanted to be a dentist. My dad and brother, pediatricians, I didn't really want to go that route. I like working with my hands and I just thought, this is a good way to go. So that's where I went.

Okay. So you went to dental school, you graduated. So how did you get started into airway health? Or was that the first step for you?

No, no. So my first step was, so I graduated from Hughes Dental School, taught there for the first 5 years. And my big thing was aesthetic dentistry. And when I graduated, if you cut a tooth for aesthetics, you could be taken to the board. I mean, we didn't have really bonding at that time. And so to enamel you could, but not to dentin. And so one thing led to another and I started, I always wanted to train with the best. So I started training with the best cosmetic dentist in the world, did that. And then all of a sudden we had like TMJ cases that turned from veneer cases. And we thought, well, what are we doing here? We didn't manage the bite properly. So we learned TMJ, then we learned neuromuscular dentistry. Got a chance to teach with Bob Jankelson, lecture with him, Jim Geary. And one thing led to another, but I had this epiphany moment where I was treating a patient from an airway standpoint, because I started to get into airway like about 2006, '07, '08. I started treating and lecturing on airway. And I had a patient that I had in a neuromuscular daytime appliance, a sleep apnea appliance at night. It helped to a degree, but it leveled out. And muscles change length. I mean, things change. And I'm always asking, why is this not working? And I looked in her mouth and it was like one of these, and this is years ago, one of these like epiphany moments. Her arch was restricted. What? And I thought, oh my God, that's crazy. And so I started to look at every one of my patients I was treating, even from a neuromuscular standpoint. And it was the common denominator. And so that got me going down. Oh my gosh, what's going on here? So I was doing a lecture In Phoenix on sleep in about 2008. And this guy in the crowd, I can tell you what slide I had up, it was Casey Guzze. And he came up to me, he said, we have to talk. And it was a guy by the name of Ted Belfour. And he was the one that introduced the Homeobloc to dentistry. And Homeobloc was a good appliance. It was fabulous at treating cranial strains, and I'll get into that in a second. But it didn't develop really. You had a screw in it, a jack screw, you turned it, but it only kept up with cranial bones that were actually changing position. So I started to get into that, and I was introduced to a Polish physical therapist, world-renowned, and started to teach us about cranial strain patterns, and it blew me away. Not at all. And so, you know, when you do veneers and you teach your patients, they become veneer snobs because they start looking, oh gosh, look at those veneers, they look terrible. So now what happens with my patients, they're face snobs because now they start analyzing faces and everybody has some craniofacial asymmetry. I mean, there are 5 environmental factors that contribute to craniofacial asymmetry. Sitting in the pelvic girdle in your mother's womb for 9 months, going through the birth canal, C-sections, lack of hard diet, lack of breastfeeding. And so without that, we have these craniofacial asymmetry, cranial strain issues, and most patients have it. When you get into problems is the symptoms. Uh-huh. And, and most people don't put that together, but like I can come into a room and look at you as a patient and within 15 seconds have a pretty good idea where I'm going with this case because I'm watching you talk to me. Where's your jaw going? That's TMJ. Should go straight up and down. It's deviating in one direction. Well, why is it deviating? Well, let me look at your ears. That's the temporal bone that's internally or externally rotated, and that drives the actual mandible in that position. I'm looking at your eye level. One eye's a little bit than the higher. One side of your face is narrower than the other. And so it's like you've got some craniofacial asymmetry. So then I say, okay, so tell me about yourself. What about your symptoms? What do you have going on? Pressure behind the eyes, blurred vision, ringing in the ears, vertigo, forward head posture, headaches, cervical neck issues, POTS checklist. Wow. And most of those patients have a variety of that. And so what I can do is treat those patients with an appliance. And if it's truly a craniofacial positioning issue, cranial bone positioning issue, there's a likelihood that we can probably help those patients. Like vertigo is interesting. So vertigo—

how many people suffer from that?

Oh, absolutely. So the interesting thing about vertigo is the vestibulocochlear system is not located in your brain. It's inside your temporal bone. So if I look at you and one ear is down here, but one ear is up here, but it's paired and it sends signals to the cortex, the brain gets confused. She says it's down here, but then she says it's up here. What's going on? I'm a little confused. I'm dizzy. I gotta lay down. Those are ear positions. And so if I, and I can show you case after case, If I can take this device and help correct craniofacial asymmetry and the ears come in, all of a sudden vertigo goes away. TMJ's the same way. So that's really my, my, my treatment syntax is craniofacial posture dictates airway, dictates tongue position, dictates head tilt, cervical instability dictates neurology. And why neurology? There's really 14, but there's 12 cranial nerves we talk about. What do they do? They go through little fissures or valleys or tendons of cranial bones.

So those Cranial nerves, they pick up the signal to send it to the brain. And if, let's say, your posture is off, then it puts pressure on this nerve. So the signals don't go properly.

So let me give you an example. It's pretty fascinating. So as a dentist, I'm going to say to you, you know, pressure behind the eyes and blurred vision. What the hell? How does that have anything to do with what we're talking

about? Yes. Good question.

Sphenoid bone. The sphenoid bone is this beautiful little bone. It's the central cog of these 8 cranial bones. And the sphenoid bone is like a swallowtail butterfly. There's greater wings and there's lesser wings. And the greater wing of the sphenoid bone is the back of the orbit of the eye. And so if I look at you and one eye is off, your sphenoid bone is off. But what's interesting, of 12 cranial nerves, 5 of those cranial nerves go directly through the sphenoid bone. And what are they involved with? Ocular nerve, muscles of the eye, vision. So there's a correlation with that.

So, okay, the sphenoid bone, you can tell that it's off. So You can actually correct this?

So let me, let me give you the premise.

Okay.

Let's do it. Okay. So we have this, I learned so much through the chiropractic world about how the whole body really works. If you compare anything else, the chiropractic world, I learned more about how this really works. And we have what's called a closed loop kinematic skeletal chain, our body. And there's 2 openings, arch of the feet and the bite. So every time you swallow and with most people, By the time your big fat tongue gets out of the way, because it's between your teeth and it shouldn't be, it should be right at the roof of your mouth, you lock yourself back into the system. So if you are like this, every time you swallow, you lock yourself back in the system. These cranial bones, the way I view it, are like puzzle pieces or colored blocks. And if I have a bunch of colored blocks and I try to move that middle yellow block, it's not going anywhere. It's locked

in. Yeah.

Now, if I take that middle yellow block out and move the adjacent blocks, what happens? They move. I created a gap or a space. So the interesting thing is with this appliance that we wear at night only, when you bite down, you're only hitting on one side, which is so counterintuitive by the way we're trained. Yes. But that creates a gap or a space to allow these cranial bones to self-adjust. So the big thing in letting the body heal or putting the body in a position to be able to heal is creating gaps and spaces, removing restrictions, improved motion. And that's what this does. I mean, these cranial bones aren't fused. They move.

I think you just blew us away with all this information.

I haven't even started. But this is, but this is incredible. It's fascinating. I mean, I could get into, I mean, what this really did to me in my career is forced me to learn anatomy because we never learned it in school.

I agree. Did you have cadaver lab when you went to dental school?

Well, I did. I did. And we did it as a medical student.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. I hated that lab because I worked. like 25 hours a week all through dental school as a bartender. So I wouldn't get home till 4 in the morning. And then I'd say, yeah, I didn't want to get up at 3 hours and go to cadaver lab and smell that formaldehyde. I've been smelling alcohol all night. So, but anyway, so, but we didn't know because

we wouldn't.

Exactly. Exactly. So, so because of this closed loop system, every time you go ahead and bite together, you lock yourself back into the system. Like if you go to chiropractor and get adjusted.

Yes. Which I have. Several, like weekly.

And why do you keep going back? Because this is never addressed.

You're absolutely right. I'm going to come see you.

Okay. So the other thing that this block does, do you want me, you want to ask more questions or you want to—

No, go ahead. I would love to know about this block because I have never seen, right? Even as a periodontist, I work with a prosthodontist in the office and she always talks about, you know, bilateral stuff. That's right. Balanced occlusion. But this is so fascinating to me, this one-sided block.

So it, you know, we're, by the way, designed to be one-side chewers. So if I take a carrot and throw it in your mouth and say, okay, Sandra, start chomping. Are you chomping on both sides?

No.

No, one side.

And then you switch to the other.

Yeah. Yeah. Until it gets pulverized. And then, you know, like if I said, you know, I really like you, I'm going to take you to McDonald's and treat you to a fish fillet. So we go to McDonald's.

But you really don't like me.

Well, that's true. That's a good point. But if you took a fish fillet and bit into it, you're biting on both sides right away because of our lack of hard diet.

Yeah,

it's all this processed food we have. So that block is really critical to correct cranial strains because it once again removes the restrictions of these cranial bones, allows them to pump. They they they move. They pump the cerebral spinal fluid. This okay. Here we go. Here's another blow away. Okay. They move about ten to fourteen times a minute depending on what you read in the literature. These are not fused. I can I just wrote an article about that cited literature Russia Space Agency NASA. chiropractic world, they expand and contract 10 to 14 times a minute. Now, why is that important? Cerebrospinal fluid. So why is that important? Nurses the brain, oxygenates the brain, gets rid of the toxins, cools the pituitary and hypothalamus, your hormones. And it doesn't take a 10th of a 10th of a degree to be off, cools the pineal gland, circadian rhythm, sleep, melatonin production. So it's difficult to measure, but I can tell you most of my patients will come in, And these symptoms start to kind of resolve. Not all of them. I tell my patients, if you think I'm going to cure you, don't do this. It's too multifactorial. But if I can put your body in a better position to function 24/7, absolutely. So that's what we do. So now we have this moving more ideally and sleep is a little bit better. Not just airway. I mean, we all talk about it. I mean, okay, let me slow down here. Let me talk about the block and one other aspect of it. Okay. So we have the cerebrospinal fluid flow. Okay. Yeah. We put a block in there. We're getting rid of these restricted cranial bones and allowing them to be freed up and move better. So now we're improving motion also. Okay. So there's 2 other interesting things about the block. So because the block's in there, you have the ability to be able to get your tongue up and forward. And there's 2 important things about that. We in dentistry, in airway dentistry, are so focused on the size of the airway. We look at that sagittal view. Oh my God. That's right. I have patients that have gigantic fricking airways. They have obstructive sleep apnea. I have patients that have tiny little airways that don't. And my feeling is the tone is almost more important than the size of the airway. I have a thing that I do with patients that I do resistance breathing with them because we want to tone the airways, like going to the gym and working out. So with a block in there, you have the ability to be able to have the tongue come anterior superior up and forward. Mm-hmm. Most people don't understand that the tongue is attached directly to the back of the airway by this tiny little muscle called the glossal. Pharyngeal muscle. So when the tongue is down and back, flat laying splint, the tongue or the actual airway collapses. When the tongue is up and forward, the airway gets toned. And then the other aspect is this. Now with the tongue being able to come up and forward, we're now innervating this palatoglossal muscle, which is innervated by the superior pharyngeal plexus branch of the vagus nerve. So now all of a sudden we have coherence with this patient also. And you can measure that with a heart rate variability monitor. It's so easy. Hook them up, put a flat plane splint in, they're incoherent. 2 and a half minutes later, put in a block appliance, they become coherent almost instantaneously.

Yeah. So let's talk about that coherent versus incoherent.

Yes.

Because a lot of people listening are like, okay, what does that mean? And why is that important to my health?

Okay. So that's critical. So coherence and incoherence is basically heart rate variability. And heart rate variability is the difference between the sympathetic and parasympathetic. Heartbeat. It's called variability because the heart doesn't beat like a metronome. There's variability between each beat. And that variability tells you whether this patient is in coherence or not. If I'm in coherence and I'm in a coherence of about 100, I'm in a zone. I'm like, I'm, I'm cool. I'm chill. I'm like feeling fantastic. If I am only maybe 20 or 30%, I'm stressed. I'm incoherent. I'm not feeling good. I'm just not with it. You know, what's interesting. Michael Jordan, the GOAT, his tongue was hanging out most of the time when he's playing.

Interesting. I never noticed that.

Coherence in airway. And he was always cool as a cucumber. So anyway, so that's when you look at things anatomically, this whole thing makes total sense, but we were never taught to look at it this way. And so what I've tried to do is because I was asking why, try to figure out all these little parts and pieces that are out there and try to bring them in, distill it to make it make sense. So all of a sudden it's like, it's a gotcha moment.

And I know some dentists listening to our show are completely intrigued and want to learn. So I will put the information for your teaching courses and platform down in the show notes.

There's another thing I want to talk about too. A couple of things.

Yes.

So there's, there's 2 things in particular that are very important. The first thing is what is quantum physics? What type of forces are we as dentists putting into the body to affect epigenetically that environment? To get a certain result. And in dentistry, everything, I call it McDentist. Everything's becoming fast these days. Marpy Sarpy, active expansion. And what we want to do is create an environment for a body to heal. And to do that, you want to put light cyclic intermittent forces into the body to develop the body. Moves for the fascia is 2 Hz, light intermittent, intermittent forces, cyclical. We walk that way. We breathe that way. We chew

that way. Wow.

When you put static forces into the body, the body resists it and does not like it. J.J. Mayo, 2010, Columbia University, did some really interesting study, did a number of them. And he took stem cells from cranial sutures and he put static forces on those stem cells and they differentiated into osteoclasts for bone breakdown. That's how traditional ortho works. How do you move the tooth in the bone? Create the space. Take those same stem cells and put light cyclic intermittent forces on them. They differentiate into osteoblasts for bone growth. That's what we want. So that's a big, big thing that I think is like critical and is really missed. The other thing is this active expansion that's going on. Why do we get relapse with these cases? Why do Marquis Sarpy cases relapse?

Right? You see a lot of people, they get these beautiful arches and all of a sudden everybody gets crowding, crowding back again.

Because this goes back to my treatment syntax. Craniofacial posture dictates everything else. If you look at the maxilla, we are under the impression that the maxilla is just the maxillary suture and we're expanding and that's all we're doing. There's 4 other sutures. The maxilla is like a pyramid. And so if you aren't correcting these also concurrently when you're doing development, it's going to relapse. And most of these Marpy-Sarpy cases and most of these active expansion cases, when you look at the before and after pictures, and most of them don't show it because they're not looking at that, their cranial strain patterns are worse. So then you have to ask yourself, how important is the size of the airway? I mean, you look at the Bernoulli principle, how much of a percentage of an increase in the size of that tube do you need to increase the flow? Not a whole lot, but we're talking about 55,000 millimeters of development. I don't know if that really is critical. And then we get back to the tone of the airway. So I just want to bring that to the attention because those cranial sutures need to be addressed first, or you're going to exacerbate the existing cranial strain. And once again, it goes back to It's not what we're trained to look at. It's what we're trained not to look at. And we're not trained to look at it.

Yeah.

When I look at all these cases, it's, it's constant. One more thing. When you, like, if you blindfolded me and put me behind a patient, I'd never seen their face before and said, you know, Tim, can you tell me what the face looks like? I can almost tell you exactly what the face looks like. Because if, and I'm bringing this in too, because I want to tie this into Morbus Sarpie. Most patients have one eye that's higher. And that one eye that's higher is the side that the maxilla, which is a paired bone, Is internally rotated. And that internally rotated side is narrower and steeper. When you try to actively expand a maxillary suture that's internally rotated, guess what happens? Phew! Because the maxillary suture has these— it's only, it's a plain suture. It's like a gut suture. And it has these fibers that are so intertwined. If you try to actively expand that, it resists those forces and the opposite side is blown out. Look at all these Marpy-Sarpy cases and you look at their maxilla and gosh, it looks like it's really big, but guess what? It's like this. This was never addressed.

Yeah, because yeah, you're right. So based on the information, you know, right, you learned a lot from chiropractors. How do you feel the dental curriculum should change? Because I feel there's got to be a change here in dentistry moving forward.

Absolutely. But it's not just dentistry, it's medicine too. You know, the problem, the challenge with our educational system Is that we're trained in little compartments, little bubbles, and nothing's connected. If you look at a tooth, each tooth is directly related to a specific organ. And so you say, oh, Tim, that's a bunch of you know what. Are you kidding me? Go to Oroban's histology book. Ectoderm, mesoderm, endoderm. Ectoderm is the nervous system in the teeth. It's all related. By the way, fascia is mesoderm, connects everything. Mm-hmm. So that's just gigantic. And so What I'm getting at is we need to understand as dentists, as the dental curriculum, each tooth is part of a whole biological matrix, not just a particular tooth in the mouth in a periodontal ligament. It's attached to everything. So if I touch one tooth, this is biotensegrity, this is fascia, this is mechanical transduction. How is it transmitted? It is transmitted instantaneously throughout the body, all the way down to the nucleus. What type of tension to stretch the chromatin to expose a gene that was never exposed before? for a new protein in the ribosome, that little Xerox machine, for a brand new behavior within 15 seconds. It's powerful. So to answer your question, we need to start looking at this whole system and how it's connected, not just each individual part.

I agree 100%. And that's what the show is all about. You know, and we have so many experts talking about this tooth chart meridian and talking about how the mouth affects the body. And it's something that I think even, I remember going to dental school 20 plus years ago. It was all about teeth and how to cut into teeth, but yeah.

That's all we know. I mean, it's, it's, you know, when teeth come together, it creates piezoelectric energy.

Yes.

Goes right through the body. You know, and then you get into light. I mean, we haven't talked about that, but you get an infrared light. I mean, that's where it's all going. I mean, the more electrically charged we are, the healthier we are. The less electrically charged, you know, cancer cells, you start getting down to 20, negative 20, they, that's where they survive. They can't survive in 50, 60, 70 millivolts.

Yeah.

They can't do it.

I would love to talk about that, actually.

Yeah. So, so that's just gigantic.

So actually having this piezoelectric energy, which is so important, how does that relate to the bite?

So it relates to the bite. It all gets back down to balance. And that, and you know, it's important to have a balanced bite and to have that energy balanced on both sides. And if it's not, then you have one side that is more predominant than the other side. And now that you can't measure some of the stuff. But it affects the whole system, the whole body. And so that's critical. I mean, I'll do full mouth rehabilitation cases just like most people do, and you want a balanced occlusion. But the only way you can once again break this whole thing up is you have to be a disruptor and you have to disrupt this whole system. So now the system can heal on its own.

Absolutely. So you're almost, when you talk about disruption, what do you mean by that? You put a little stress somewhere in order to get a disruption?

Disruptive in a number of ways, disruptive in our how we're taught disruption into now we've got a cranial strain pattern and we want to disrupt that to relieve it, to allow the body to be able to heal better. Uh, it's just anything, a disruptor is a good thing in a way, especially when a body is not in the most ideal position and whose body really is, you

know? Yeah. Like that's a good point. Like how many people do you think have this asymmetry?

Everybody.

Everybody

to a degree. Yeah. So, you know, and that's, you know, once again, it's those 5 environmental factors. So I don't go in there and say, you know, everybody needs to be treated. I mean, I mean, I have asymmetry. I mean, it's not bad, but I have it.

I know I have asymmetry too.

Yeah. But when you start talking, when you start tying these signs and symptoms together, that's when it gets pretty powerful. And I mean, going back to, we talked about how do you change things? I mean, you've got to be able to educate the professionals about how this interaction is because Blurred vision, pressure behind the eyes. That's just coincidental. It's not. Vertigo. It's not. Cervical issues. This is interesting. So forward head posture is your body's attempt to do CPR. What's the first thing in CPR? ABC airway, chin thrust, forward head posture. So when you look at Janet Travell's book on trigger points, which is fascinating.

Classic book.

Yes. She has these, I call them Janet Travell zones, the vertex, top of the head, the temple, whatever. And those are trigger point zones. And if you look at the main source of all of those trigger point zones in the body, there's 3 muscles that are almost invariably all of them. Traps, scalenes, sternocleidomastoid. Forward head posture. And that's why when people come in to see me and they think they either have TMJ or they have airway, it's one and the same. You can't separate it. It's craniofacial posture.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

This is so fascinating.

Thanks.

Thank you so much for being here, Eddie.

I thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

Yeah, I feel like I could talk to you for a whole nother hour.

We could.

Yeah, so schedule a part 2, everybody.

I'd love it. I'd love it.

Yeah,

really would, for sure.

Amazing. And I'm really excited about, you know, putting the information about your courses because this is such a needed part in dentistry. We can impact so many people with symptoms that, you know, really are debilitating.

Yeah, no, you're so right. And it's just, it needs to be out there. Yeah. Somebody asked me about 2 years ago, what do you want to do, Tim? And I was kind of in this zone where I was just kind of trying to figure out where I wanted to go with this journey. And I just, I looked at him and said, I'm ready to unleash this on the dental medical community because they need to know how this whole thing really works.

Yeah. And you're in the right place here at AGBGC. And I'm excited about our biological channel.

Yes, that would be fun. So I'm looking forward to it. Once again, thank you so much for giving me this platform to be able to share with you.

Yeah, it's my pleasure. Thank you for being here. And everyone listening, if you know somebody who could benefit from this episode, please share it with them. And until next time, stay healthy and keep smiling. Thank you so much for joining me this week. Please make sure you check out the show notes for any links mentioned in the show. If you like today's show, please invite your friends to listen as well. That would mean a Do you have a question you'd like me to answer? Message me on Instagram @DrSanda. This is Dr. Sanda, and remember, your mouth is the gateway to your health, so take care of it in the most natural and best way possible.