Dr. Kassi Klein explains why fixing how your mouth works matters more than how it looks. Treating functional problems like tongue thrusting or airway issues before structural ones prevents relapse, whether you're a kid or an adult.
I feel like the word that comes up a lot in this space, especially these days, aside from like, airway centric, is functional, like functional approach to treatment. So what does that look like in your office? So my famous words are form follows function. And for everybody that comes through, adults and children, we look and we see where the biggest deficit is. Right. So is this a child that the function is just off the charts? We cannot get, you know, they're tongue thrusting, they can't control their food. They are, they're drooling. Is it, is it this a functional first or sometimes it's structured. Do we have these, like, extremely narrow jaws that even if the tongue was functioning perfectly, could it even do what it needs to do inside these jaws? Right. So we have to look at form and function and determine what needs to come first. And it is a little bit different for each patient. But I can move teeth wherever I want to. I can do whatever I can do with hard tissue and jaws. But if the function is not there to support the structural changes we've made, it's not going to be stable long term.
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