Episode 208: Dr. Felix Liao: Your Child’s Best Face

Hi and welcome to episode 208 of the Untethered podcast. Today we have Dr. Felix Liao joining us. Dr. Felix put the missing mouth back in the healthcare map with his four Amazon best sellers. His books established him as a thought leader in healthcare innovation and as an expert airway centered mouth doctor. AMD Dr. Felix coined the term impaired mouth syndrome in 2017 to highlight the mouth structure's pivotal role in the many medical, dental and mood symptoms. He's shown in his next four books that correcting impaired mouth can break through many problems resistant to standard treatment. He champions cross training for healthcare professionals to integrate mind, body and mouth. Dr. Felix holds an engineering degree from Brown University and DDS from Case School of Dental Medicine. He's a past president of the International Academy of Biological Dentistry and Medicine and his continuing Education honors include MAGD, ABGD, MIA, BDM and DIP, ASBA. Dr. Felix sees patients two days a week in Falls Church, Virginia and spends the rest of his time teaching and mentoring as a Director of AMD training. Quick disclaimer all information, content and material of this podcast are the opinions of the speakers and is for the informational purpose only and not intended to serve as a substitute for the consultation, diagnosis and or medical treatment of a qualified healthcare provider.

Welcome to the Untethered Podcast.

I am your host, Hallie Balkan. I'm a certified orofacial myologist, feeding specialist and mentor. This podcast is all about getting your questions answered and collaborating with colleagues to bring you the most up to date information in the orofacial myofunctional therapy, tethered oral tissue and airway space. I challenge you to keep an open mind and join my mission to get this information out to the masses.

Let's get started. Dr. Felix, welcome back to the podcast.

Wow. Happy to rejoin you. Always fun.

It is always fun. And you know, I'm sitting here with your book, your Child's Best Face that you had sent to me, what, April 2022 I believe it was right after I'd had my, my ENT surgery, my septoplasty nasal swell body reduction, you know, basically so I could nasal breathe again. And I was reading through this book and I just remember thinking this is amazing. This is such a easy to understand and beautifully explained example of what's happening, this big epidemic that's happening, epigenetics and everything in our children and how we can maybe prevent what we're seeing. So without giving too much away, I would love to turn it over to you because you know, I'm, I'm A parent who? A parent. A mother. You know, I'm in my. I'm 37. I've gone through perfect age.

Perfect age.

Okay, thank you, thank you. But I've gone through, you know, additional appliance, oral appliances, now ENT surgery and orofacial myofunctional therapy. I've really cleaned up my diet, you know, starting 10 years ago, and just become really aware of everything going in my body, on my body, you know, in my mouth. And I think that that's really where this conversation starts, because so many of the adults that are walking around, you hear all the time, oh, we grew up. We turned out okay. And my, you know, my response is always like, but, but, did we. Did you. Are you really okay? I don't know. Are we just kind of. This is just a status quo now. So I'd love to have you maybe share a bit about what parents may be experiencing so they can understand both what we want to prevent in our children, and then maybe we can talk about how. How we go about doing that.

Sure. Thank you for the opportunity, and I'm happy to share this with you. Allow me to just put a slide on that you find interesting. I think we have lots of experience in terms of how the mouth might impair my impact on whole body health, where our traditional medical dental divide has not served the patient. That's why we evolved this whole health concept where inside the body, there are no departmental lines, even though in hospitals we have, you know, the er, the or, the ob, the ent, and the gut, everything but the ma. And you're all mothers. Right. You know that when your baby is born, first thing to do is make it cry so they would inflate the lungs. And after that, you feed the baby. And after the baby is fed, it falls asleep. And then what? You repeat the cycle so that the baby can grow and finally stood up, grab things, put it in its mouth, and finally crawl and stand up and walk. Right. This is a process that starts with the mouth. The mouth is to humans what roots are to plants. And yet we don't have a department of the mouth. We don't have mouth doctors, and that's why we have so many problems. Does that make sense?

It does make sense. And, you know, and people, if they've been listening to my podcast for the past three years, probably have heard me say that, you know, dentists, pediatric dentists are the pediatricians of the future, because our health starts in our mouth, and we need to be looking. And that's our window into our Systemic, you know, to everything going on. So 100% makes sense. And I never really thought about it on a hospital level. Right. I know we treat in silos, but I never really came to realize there really isn't a department for oral health.

Yep, yep. So let me put this on here and we'll just look at a few slides so that we can see what can happen when you do things right or when you don't do it right. Perfect. So here we go. Share screen. This one. So can you see my screen?

Okay, I can. I can. And for anybody who's listening, you can watch this on YouTube as well if you'd like to see this screen.

So how many of you can relate to these two pictures on the left?

Yeah, the pain.

Right shoulder pain and fatigue. Okay, so how do you get here at age a tender age of 37. Right. Or 39 or whatever? Okay, how did you get there? Odds are that when you were a child, no doctors you've ever been taken to saw it come in. What I'm here to share with you is that now we can, we can help your child head off the suffering you have. Now. It all starts with the mouse, like we were saying earlier. So I just gave a talk last week in Chicago at ada midwinter meeting, Midwest winter meeting. I basically said that Newton discovered the gravity by observing how an apple fell to the ground. And he said, well, how come it didn't fall sideways or upward? Well, asking that question led to space travel. Okay. It freed us from being bound to the earth's flat or being bound to Earth. We could fly after that. Okay, so I'm not Newton, but I've had a few apples that landed on my head in my career. And finally, after 35 years, I came up with this term called impaired mouse syndrome. Okay, so I'll explain what that is in a minute. But this will solve a lot of the problems that dentists and doctors face that become what we call the head scratcher cases. I don't know what else to do for you now. What do you mean you can't. There's got to be an answer for this. Well, a lot of times what happens is that the six foot tiger, meaning the oversized tongue in an undersized set of jaws, was overlooked as a condition because we don't have a department of the mouth. We don't have mouth doctors who are looking after your airway. And we all know how important airway is now that the pandemic is starting to recede. Right? Okay, so what happened was that When I got to dental school, I couldn't understand why people grind their teeth. All right, so bruxer is the medical term for teeth grinders. Okay, so look at these eight symptoms and just finger count how many you have. I'm willing to bet you have more than one. Okay, so a syndrome is a collection of symptoms that are connected to a condition. Okay, so teeth grinding is part of a syndrome. It's not psychological stress. I agree, it's stress. But I'll tell you the biggest stress is that when your airway is choked, that is the ultimate threat in terms of life or death. I expanded this a little bit and I defined impaired mouth syndrome as a vast set of medical, dental, and mood symptoms that can arise from deficient jaws and obstructed airway. In between. There, I could put in oversized tongues. When do you get oversized tongues? When you're hypothyroid? When you're overweight and obese? When you have a sweet tooth? When you have a pot belly. Okay? All of these things impact on how your whole body works. When you get a pot belly, you get a double chin. When you get a double chin, your tongue has fat infiltration. Look at all these conditions that are associated with having a six foot tiger in a three foot cage. Now, this is not a claim. These are conditions that my patients report to me as having improved after I treated this. I don't touch the patient's low back, I don't touch their depression. I certainly don't treat their ED or pms. But they tell me, oh, my God, it gets better. I had a young patient recently whose mother and herself both suffer from seasonal affective disorder. And the kid is on medication. It's being cut back 75% since we started treatment.

Incredible.

Yeah. Okay, so without airway, you are on a degenerative track. You don't have health. Okay? It's that simple. So when you restore this and the patient can sleep, you pair that with a healthy diet, guess what? Nearly everything gets better and better yet, all of this involves no shots, no drills, no pain, no prescription drugs to cover up the track later on, okay? And you get to keep with your gains. It doesn't relapse like some braces. Requires retainers or else teeth will go back. Okay, so we need to look beyond the traditional viewfinder where dentists only see teeth and doctors only see their silo specialty. Like, okay, I'm a knee doctor, I only see your knees. We need to see about putting the patients back together. I feel that to put the patient back Together. We really need to look at this thing here because I'm going to show you a couple cases where it was going to improve both the medical and the dental symptoms.

And so you're seeing an overlap then between both dental medical. As far as impaired mouth and mood.

Yes, and mood. Yes. So all of this stress that we see in kids in school, whether it's social or performance or peer pressure, it's all the same. How your brain works depends more on oxygen than your heart. At least with your heart not working, you don't feel like moving. But if your brain doesn't get enough oxygen, you can't even think correctly or make the right decision. Practically, in the dental world, this means that the dentist should not be thinking about a nightguard. You should be thinking about an airway. This is the paradigm shift where the apple drops on the head. Teeth grinding is one frame in a movie. The movie is called resuscitation during sleep to open up your airway. Okay. The movie is not. Oh, you are overthinking your relationship troubles. No. Okay. Choking off the airway is a bigger stress in relationship troubles.

Trust me, it's a big stress, I think, in everything in life. Really?

Absolutely. Okay. Yeah. So those of you who have a night guard or being prescribed a night guard and it's sitting your, you know, medicine cabinet unworn, it's time to think airway. Okay? Because the night guard is from the worldview that says the earth was flat. Well, we have circumnavigated the world and we now know it's round. Okay, so this is a new way to think.

Well, and also, Dr. Felix, patients who are grinding down their night guards, who are cracking them, who are. They're just getting new ones remade. You hear this all the time.

If you look at my cursor over the blue arrow right now, and I'm going to move it over, you can see this patient ground through her Nigar. Well, what's the point of the Nigar? It does not turn off teeth grinding because this root cause problem persists. We need to solve this problem. This misses the mark, practically. What difference does it make? Well, here's the same dentist who took the training to become an airway mouth doctor. That's my brand. She went from here at week one to month three to month 12. Wow. Your pick. Which face you rather have.

Month 12.

Right. Okay, so let me walk you through what happened in as few slides as possible. So she says, I'm living in Paramount syndrome right now. I have severe TMJ pain and Lots of that is despite lots of chiral acupuncture, massage and trigger point injection. So she's tried everything. She also has a fatigue, grinding and choked airway. What did we do? We gave her our treatment, which consists of an expander for adults. Yes. The earth is no longer flat, it's round. Now you can give expanders to adults and we give them a bone building diet which consists of green smoothies and bone broth. It's very simple. Here's what happened. This is a table summarizing her presenting symptoms. She had nine symptoms. Jaw pain, sleep quality, right hip clicking, mouth breathing, headache, back pain, sleepiness during the day, brain fog, poor digestion. It's a mix of medical, dental, mostly medical. Right. And we use a scale of 0 to 10. 10 is you're rolling on the floor in pain or you can't get out of bed, you're totally non functional. Zero is like you're a teenager. Nothing can touch me. Right? Well, she came in at 57 for nine of them. Okay, so look what happened in 10 weeks time going to the right on this table. Her job came from 8 to 2. Sleep quality 8 to 1. Right. Hip clicking went from 6 to 0. Right. The hip pain goes away from what? A mouthpiece. Come on. Okay. Headache went away, back pain went away 75%. Brain fog went away 60%. Poor digestion even improved 75%. Her total net gain improved 81% from one treatment. This treatment, like I said, involves no shock, no pain, no prescriptions afterwards. Her life quality went from this much trouble to this little in 10 weeks. You saw what happens with her face in 12 months. Okay, so this is an example where even the dentist is a victim of this awareness gap in their training. Okay? And it's not just limited to dentists. Like, here's a medical doctor who is a super advanced surgical specialist. She bought herself a new set of teeth because she had ground them flat. She had acid reflux, and all her teeth are eroded by stomach acid. After she bought this new set of teeth, and we all know how much that costs, she still had neck pain. In fact, she had a lot of pain. She has so much pain that she went ahead and do jaw surgery. And here you have a beautiful set of teeth, an operated set of jaws. There's nothing more dentistry can do. And she still had all these problems.

Yeah, eight nines and tens.

She came in at 99 on 11 symptoms. That means her average is nine out of ten on a scale of zero to ten.

Yeah.

Her migraine went from ten to one in four months. Her anxiety, eight to five. Her teeth grinding ten to two and on and on and on. Neck pain, nine to two, back pain, eight to one. Right. So how does the mouth have this much influence? Well, it's very simple. The mouth is to humans what roots are to plants. We all grow from the mouth. The mouth feeds all the systems and all the organs in the body. The mouth organizes the whole body. I had a dentist partner who went home after he heard my thesis on what the mouth role in whole body health is. And he said, you know, Felix, on Monday morning I went home and observed my dog. And I think you're right. A dog is nothing but a mouth mounted on four legs.

Yeah, it's so true.

Oh, man. So what happens when your mouth is wrong off deficient as an understructure infrastructure? I'm sorry. Right, you're going to have molecular problem is what we show up here. But the nice thing is with a very simple, non invasive treatment that works while you sleep, you can improve 70% or 81% in four months or 10 months. No drug, no side effects, no shots, no drill.

Yeah, well, and it's incredible, if I can interject because I've had some adult patients come to me who've been to many, many specialists who are at their wit's end, who've been told that they have all kinds of diagnoses. They think they're clinically crazy at this point with PTSD and other things going on. And I, you know, they sit in front of me and I go, well, has anybody looked at your airway? Has anybody looked at your sleep? I mean, I'm just, I'm looking at you right now and we just did this myo eval and here's the list of what I see going on through. Right, right. You know, and then it circles back to like, well, what do you mean? Like, you can actually help me. Like I was expecting just to go through this process again and be told that, like, I was out of luck. And you see grown men cry, you know, because you tell them that there is something that can help you and that we're helping people with every day. So I love these stories, you know, these cases that you're sharing, because we see it in practice and it's unfortunate that it's not more widely known.

Yes. These cases basically show that the earth is round, no longer flat. We need to take a different approach. And myo eval experts on myofunctional therapy and evaluations like Howie are the ones who can really Tell at a glance that you have this trouble, okay? And to me, myofunctional therapists are as important, and maybe more so, as nurses in medicine. Okay? They have a diagnostic capability just simply by looking, without having to subject you to all kinds of tests in a hospital. And we can tell you, hey, you got this problem choking your airway. Here's one of the dental. Aha. Like the apple that drop on my headsets, an impaired mouth creates a vast set of medical, dental, and mood symptoms. When you treat this impaired mouth as a root cause, everything gets better. That's the definition of a syndrome. A combination of symptoms and signs that together represents a disease process. Okay? So now you can see that the mouth can create all these problems. And when you fix the mouth, all these problems will largely improve. Now's the time after that to go see your medical doctor for the mop up. But first, you set the body straight with opening up the airway and strain the mouth first, because that's the first requirement. Think of yourself as a newborn. Your mouth is where you work from. So here is a good example. What happens when you set the mouth straight. This was two and a half years later, and she gave birth to a baby in between. All right. Do you approve?

I approve. I know that with my first, my nose changed in pregnancy because my airway was compromised. And my second, you know, I was already working on it and so things were a little bit different. But, I mean, she looks fabulous for having.

Yeah, you look at. Yeah, you look at the facial complexion, and you cannot fake this thing. Okay? You can't Photoshop this thing. Yeah. So I want to show you the.

Symmetry, just the shape of everything.

Yeah, yeah, I will tell you that. I'll show you another case that represent the other extreme. Does she have straight white teeth?

They look pretty straight, yes.

She's miserable. She had 30 years of pain. She felt so bad from all this pain, you can tell one look that her face has. She's in trouble, right? Yeah. She reached out to me from the western edge of Australia after she read six Foot tiger and three Foot cake. But she was so desperate. And here's what she said. My teeth don't align. My bite is off. I have tension and stress in my jaws, in my throat, in my tongue. It affects my mental state every day. And they have contributed to her suicidal desires. It was so bad, she wanted to almost kill herself. What good is it to have the nicest set of teeth in the morgue?

It's a good question, right? Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, and that's what society basically sells us. Straight, sexy, you know, not these healthy airways.

Yeah. So these blue arrow represents is pointing to rather one set of premolars per quadrant. You should have two. Okay. This means that this patient had teeth pulled and spaces closed with braces when she was 12 years old. So she doesn't have a six foot tiger in a three foot cage. She now has a two foot cage because her tongue didn't get correspondingly reduced with surgery. So that's how she ended up with an airway like this. So the white represents a wide end. The, the white represents the Y end of the airway. And so here's the color scale. White is wide open like a four lane highway. Red and black represents a one lane highway. Okay. So can you imagine trying to survive on one quarter of your income? You won't do too well. Right, so here's what happened. We put her through our treatment program and here's her face in 11 months.

She looks a lot happier.

Yeah. And this is what happens when you can pass through your own fingers between your upper and front teeth, lower front teeth. That means you don't have a TMJ problem in an acute way, like a lock or a slipped disc that kept you from working your jaw to its full range of motion. So you can see that the power of sleep, the power of airway, the power of the mouth in whole body health. Okay? So everything about beauty that every woman want, everything about youth that every man wants, comes from this airway and the sleep and this ability to renewal and clean house properly. So this has implications on how to raise a kid. Right. The first time. So we don't go through this. Okay, so this was an example of a man made disaster. Right? She was born with 32 teeth, she ended up with 24. Why? Because the dentist says you need to take out four so that I can line up the rest of your teeth straight. And oh, by the way, you have four more wisdom teeth that we need to take out so that you don't crowd up the rest of the teeth. Well, how would you like to have one third of your fingers and toes cut off?

I wouldn't. That's a really good analogy.

All right.

Yeah, yeah. Your shoes are too small, your feet don't fit in them. Let's just chop your toes off. Right?

Yeah. Why don't we think in terms of raising the child or every human being to the full genetic potential instead?

Yes.

Okay, so this is the reason why we work on this thing here. Okay. So this is the duckling to swan story. All right, so another aha is that the. Crowding is not the result of too many teeth. God put the teeth there for a reason. Okay? Crowding is the result of too little jaw growth. Think about 16 kids waiting for a school bus to show up. And finally the bus shows up with 12 seats. What should you do? Do you take 12 kids and leave four on the sidewalk? That's what the previous case did. Or do you call for a bigger bus?

Bigger bus.

I'm telling you. Why? Every One of the 13, 15 year old I ask, they know the right answer. Bigger bus, just like you just said.

Is that amazing?

Well, how come the orthodontist left four on the sidewalk? In fact, eight on the sidewalk. Okay. We call them eight on the floor. Okay? That's what happened with the previous patient. So here the child is a very vulnerable place. If the dentist is from the dark ages in which the earth was flat, she said risk of having teeth taken out and this airway made worse. This is literally the same child's airway. This mouth goes with this airway. This mouth goes with this airway. This is the side view. This is the frontal view.

Yeah. Very shaped maxilla, maxillary arch.

Yeah. Okay, she's got baby teeth coming. Adult baby teeth not leaving. And adult teeth come in. That's why she's so jumbled up. And there are reasons why that is. Okay. She had been kept away from a dentist's office during the COVID pandemic just out of overabundance of caution. And so when she came to see me, she had this. Okay, so it's really dangerous at this point because it's so tempting. You got way too many teeth. And I'm telling you the answer is you have too little jaws. Universally, that is the case. I believe that every tooth is entitled to its seat in the jaw. Just like everybody. Every member of the family deserves a seat at the Thanksgiving dinner table when there's room for all the teeth to line up straight. You have my definition of your child's best face showing up. We can make that happen now. And here's what the next case shows. This kid came to see me when was 11 years old. Her mom was already a patient of mine, so she was familiar with six foot tiger, three foot cage firsthand. So on the left is our crowding from the front, and that's her face. On the right is three and a half years later, no braces. This is what we call duckling to swan. This is now predictably successful with a committed parent And a trained airway mouth doctor. You can't do this with out additional training knowing that the earth is no longer flat.

Right, right. Which is why I drive over an hour to our dentist in North Miami, because.

Exactly.

Okay, I can't find it where I live right now, so.

That's right, yeah. Because the earth just turned flat and all the dentists. I mean, the earth just turned around. I'm sorry? Because the earth just turned around and all the dentists were trained in the old school where their professors taught them, hey, the earth is flat. Don't go off the left edge because you'll fall off the edge of the earth. So don't go there. I. E. Don't give adult expanders.

Yeah.

All right. Okay, so old ideas die hard. If you didn't learn in dental school, it cannot possibly be true, right? Well, no, it is possible. It is possible that the earth is round and somebody's got to explore it. Now, what we're showing is that it's possible to raise beautiful, healthy kids with no braces. Postural alignment starts right here, when you get this part straight. Remember I told you about how a child grows from the mouth? At six months, the kid can sit up, grab things, put it in his mouth, and then he learns to crawl, and then it learns to waddle, and then it learns to stand up. Okay, about a year to year and a half. But how long does it take for the mouth to finish developing? It takes 15 years. Okay, so here's the head start. And then it feeds the rest. And this part is finally ready at 15 months. Imagine those, I mean, 15 years. Imagine during those 15 years that this part was off, what would happen to the rest?

Follow suit.

Yeah. Well, I tell you, end up with scoliosis. And I have a case I successfully treated with scoliosis too. Let's see if I have it here. Nope, I didn't include it here. But it's easy enough to show you. Okay, so here's the important thing. There's a chiropractic neurologist named Paul Check. He wrote an article in 1993 called Totem Pole Hierarchy of Survival Reflexes. What reflexes do we need to have to survive first? Then you can thrive. Right. Okay, so the conclusion is breathing, eating, vision, hearing, turning the head, digestion, reproduction and locomotion. So basically, you need three through eight in order to support one and two. Guess who's on the very top of the totem pole?

Breathing and eating.

Myofunctional therapists and airway mouth doctors, ladies and gentlemen, okay. So how do you raise a kid? Well, this is my granddaughter. Okay. At six months, when a baby teeth in the front, the very first teeth are coming in, they're all drools and they're all about hand to mouth. Okay. Well you give them things to munch, you give them crunchy things to chew. I think this is really important for every mother to have. It's called baby led weaning. Okay. Breastfeeding is not the problem. Weaning is. Okay. The transition from breast to solid foods is really critical. You mess that step up and the kid's gonna have allergies and autoimmune diseases the rest of his or her life. Okay. Introducing solid foods. Notice it didn't say baby mush foods. Solid foods. Okay. Work those jaw muscles to grow the jawbones. This is my son who's a lifestyle chef. He's on the faculty of Baylor Medical School culinary medicine program. He's a professional chef that I recruited to help patients who never learn how to cook and how to eat. Okay. So he has a program called cook to thrive. And here's what happened. This is my granddaughter at two and a half. Every meal she's had since been in weaned off breast is personally prepared by him following the principles set forth in license to thrive. Okay. So you can raise beautiful children. And you want to see all the spacing between the front teeth in the child. We don't have that. The kids jaw didn't grow enough because the adult teeth are bigger than baby teeth and babies don't have spaces on either side of them. Guaranteed. Your jaw is too small for all the adult teeth when they show up. So you're going to have karate. Okay? So she is going to be the poster child for this epigenetic movement which basically is nurture plus nature. Okay. The nurture part involves fresh home cooking and a professional guidance from either myofunctional therapist or an airway muscle doctor. Not a tooth doctor. That's what a classical dentist is, the narrow way mouth doctor. Okay, so you have to understand way that the tongue shapes the face from the inside. And when you don't do that, right, you're going to have this thing called anterior open bite. Why does this tree bend in this direction? Which way is the wind blowing? Where's the force? Right. Well, same thing here, right. Why does this child look like this? Well, the lips are not together. Why? Maybe because this kid's got stuffy nose. So you parents out there, stuffynose is myofunctional therapist, business because if you don't have lip seal, you won't have a good face. Stuffy nose is airway mouth doctor's business. Because breathing starts in the nose and the mouth is not designed to breathe except for exercise or supportive roles. But your primary organ for breathing is the nose. If you don't breathe through your nose, you're going to be more anxious. If you got adhd, kids look to the nose and the lack of lip seal. With diet change and myofunctional therapy and possible expander treatment, you can turn the face from his to this and the process make the whole body work a whole lot better. Quickly run through one case. This kid came in with midlines off and a huge underbody. This is called a large overjet. That means weak chin. Okay. Very typical in young kids, which is okay. But the question is, how do you grow the jaw in that time so that you don't end up with crowding? So this is how we do our homework. It's not that important that you know what that is, except that underneath the surface is the home office for the tongue. And this airway is what grows this kid during sleep. When this is all in the minus, these are big numbers in the minus. That means this airway is too choked. And so this kid is not going to grow well. And here we can figure out what's off where and how much in the up and down direction, in front and back direction. We can design an appliance to fix this. Here's what she looks like on the same day with the appliance goes in. This is what her profile looks like.

Wow.

Her lower jaw came forward. Her tongue came out of her throat. And easily she can sleep and breathe better. This is what the appliance looks like. These edges used to be touching when we first gave it to her. She turns this gear twice a week. There's no pain involved. This crowding went from here to here in a year's time. We still need to get the upper jaw a little wider. Here's what happened.

Wow.

Okay. Every tooth in the jaws is entitled to its bone. Plot of bone. That's the parent's job. And that's the airway mouth doctor's jaw. Okay. So when we grow the jaw enough, guess what happened. We took her from left to right in profile and we took her bite from here to here. The only reason why this has got a little space area because this is the last tooth erupting the mouth and still come in. Okay, so here you have it. Best faces within every parent's reach, but you need to be committed. This is work. But it's super rewarding work. Okay? This mother drove her kid and herself three and a half hours each way every six weeks for three and a half years.

And I complain about an hour and a half. That is commitment.

There you go. That's commitment. That's commitment. Okay.

Yeah.

So I have just one more case to show you that's kind of worth looking into. So this child's mom is a naturopath turned dentist. She was sitting in my class, listening to my way of doing things, and she went home and told her best friend, who happens to be her daughter's orthodontist, take my braces off. And the orthodontist. Are you crazy? These are ceramic braces. No, take them off. Because this mother was noticing that she's a homeschool teacher, and she's a homeschool mom, and so she's also the principal and the classroom teacher for this daughter. She notices everything. She said my daughter was getting forgetful after braces. Go on. My daughter was not concentrating. My daughter was procrastinating. My. My daughter, who was training to be a soprano, couldn't hit the high notes anymore. So we took her off, put her on this approach, and here's what happens to her 10 months later. The next picture shows you how much she has blossomed, just with the expander instead of the braces. Now here's what happens two years later. This is what we call duckling to swan.

Wow.

She now wins debate tournaments.

Yeah, beautifully. Wide, straight smile.

This is what we call best face. Room for every tooth. Line up straight naturally, and with that, you'll have the best face that is genetically encoded in the genes that the child inherits from both parents. I cannot turn her into Julia Roberts or Gwyneth Paltrow, whoever your idol is. But I can turn her into the actualization of the best version of this child as determined by the genesis from the parents.

Yeah, no, it's pretty incredible. And, you know, I think it's. It's very interesting, too, as a mom who is still going through this with both of my children. Just looking at the lower jaw and the maxilla and the alignment and, you know, do we have enough space for the teeth? And that whole conversation was very different. Conversation based on which orthodontist or dentist I took them to and trying to not make myself crazy and how, you know, having to drive to North Miami, I was like, all right, I've moved from Maryland. I'm down south now. I don't have, you know, I don't have my providers up there. And at the end of the day, it was. There were talks about pulling teeth because, you know, my six year old at the time hadn't lost any teeth yet and she had shark teeth and there were talks about like, oh, let's wait a year to start her. Her intervention. She's fine. You don't need to do anything now. And I'm sitting here going like, oh, gosh, I really was hoping you'd be the person, but you're not. So let's find someone else.

That's right.

But it's incredible to see.

So the principle is.

Yeah, go ahead.

The principle is to grow the jaw enough.

Yeah.

So that all the teeth could line up straight naturally. Okay. Now first you need to have enough room. They may or may not line up straight the way you would want it. That's when you do braces or orthodontics or clear trace. Okay. But if you don't have enough real estate, we don't have enough seats on the bus. That's when the kids struggle with braces. It's painful. It takes a long time. As soon as you take the braces off, they relapse. Okay. So if you don't want all of that, make sure that the upper jaw, maxilla. So just remember maxilla is maximally important. Okay. The upper jaw needs to be wide enough for the lower jaw to fit in comfortably. That means without having to shift one side, without having to retrude. That's the opposite of protrusion. Without having to slide back and therefore take the tongue into the throat. That's why the shoe is the upper jaw, the foot is the lower jaw. If your upper jaw is like a Prada shoes, your lower jaw can fit in without having to retrue. You got to make sure that the arch is wide. Okay.

With. With parents who have infants that may be born with a retreated jaw, more retreated than, you know, we would expect them to be at birth and with a tongue tie. And they already have a high, narrow palate. Aside from obviously getting, you know, infant feeding therapists, ibclc, you know, an SLP or OT who can help with the oral motor component of feeding in the infant's mouth. Aside from that and mom, you know, working towards mom breastfeeding, if that's what she desires. Do you have other suggestions for that infant? Or is it really going to become more about the transition to solids like we were talking about with that whole food, you know, diet.

Yeah. So the first thing is don't give them mush. The second thing is, do not. Do not give them pacifiers, because here's what happens. Everybody do this fish face, like a pacifier motion, okay? What happens to the muscles here? You're hyperactivating them. And so this becomes a habit, and that becomes a constrictor of your upper jaw and your cheekbones, and that stays for life, just like what myofunctional therapists try to do with the tongue that's tied. It's a programmed pattern that stays for life. So these people always end up with narrow jaws and choke their way. Okay? So no pacifiers, no mushy food. Okay? And I would make sure that you watch them, make sure that they don't have this. This lips apart, posture. All right? So a lot of food causes this thing called food sensitivity, not allergies. Okay? Peanut allergies can kill you, but food sensitivities creates inflammation in the gut and congestion in the nose, and that's what leads to mouth breathing. And you hit it, right? This is where the original sin is. This is where the road forks. If they grow up healthy or they grow up with impaired mouth syndrome, it all starts right here, Ali. So you're spot on. You got to control this part at a very early age.

Yeah.

No mushy food. When you come off the breast weaning, no pacifier. And watch them for food sensitivities. So Google food sensitivity. You get lots of articles now, the way foods are raised in America today. I'm sorry, it'd be a surprise if your kid didn't end up with stuffy nuts.

Yeah.

Antibiotics, xenobiotics, all kinds of chemicals, all kinds of permanent, indisposable waste. That means that the wrappings that wraps your fast food during your drive through, you know, in order to let you eat without greasing up your fingers, they came up with a wrapping that does not allow grease and water to pass through. That means you have created a monster plastic that cannot be broken down in landfill. Okay? And there's evidence now that's getting all over the water supply and therefore inside our body. Okay? These are forever chemicals, it's called. Okay? And that's what's adding up to all this congestion here. If you cannot breathe through your nose, then the pollutants and the viruses are all going straight past your tonsils down to your windpipe. Your nose is your first line of respiratory infection defense. If you don't have this lip seal, get used to more temperature spikes and earaches and calls from your school nurses. When your child sent home. Okay, so this part here is really important. And typical food sensitivity factors are store bought milk, eggs. Yeah. Things that we think are sacred. Food is now coming back to Hondas. All right, so watch your kid. I favor bone broth and whole foods like green smoothies. You can put in half a banana and make it tasty. Get them used to, you know, drinking bone broth. This is her stepsister. She went to school with school lunch. And her classmates said to her, on the first day of school, you know, you meet a bunch of, a bunch of new people. And they said, are you on a diet? How come your food looks so healthy? Okay, I mean, that's it. I mean, she's 11 years old, okay. She said, would you like to try one of my Fruit Loops? Yeah. And Hillary took one bite and said, ew, I don't like it. It tastes like plastic. Is it? What's wrong with you? That's the reaction she got. Okay, so this how 180 degrees off we are now as a society, if we bring whole food to school, like people look at you askance and say, what's wrong with you? Are you on the diet? Right. Well, the diet should not be what the middle aisles of the supermarket offers. Yeah. All right, so does that answer your question?

Absolutely, yes. And you know, it's, you say this and I think about my kids, and I sent them with a planet lunchbox, a metal lunchbox that we can, you know, wash and everything. Very sustainable since Lily's had hers for four years now. And she would open up her lunch and everything is open. It's not in. There's no plastic, there's nothing to, oh, you know, it's, it's generally real food. And her teachers would always comment, oh my gosh, she has the most healthy, healthy lunches. And I'm thinking like, well, that's great, but like, aren't kids who are developing, you know, young kids with brain development is a big concern of ours. Like, shouldn't just overall growth, shouldn't we be thinking about, like, get the proteins and the vegetables and the fruit, like, what's going on? What do you mean? She has the healthiest lunch. Was everybody else eating? Like, what am I missing here?

You can't, as a parent, you cannot afford to send your kid off to school with what TV commercial shows you. Yeah, all right. That's just a no. No. All right.

Yeah.

So, you know, it is possible that we can raise the kid from here to here in three years time without braces. All right. Yeah. And it's because there's an epigenetic difference. Okay. EPI means on top of genes in addition to genes. That means nurture on top of nature. This is the same person. She has the same eyes, they're just bigger and brighter. She has the same teeth, just got wider jaws, more fully developed because that gives her a wider airway and she sleeps better and that's why she has the facial radiance. This is doable at any age. But obviously the sooner you do this, the better off the child is and the less you have to do the pay for the remedial disease care. And God forbid they do it wrong, right? So here's the same person in profile and you can see that when this part becomes more convex, the airway opens up. And this is what the airway shows on the CT scan. So here it says 120. Okay? That's the minimal cross sectional area in pre treatment. Here it says 276. We multiply this 2.3 times, it's huge. And we tripled her airway volume. The minimal cross sectional area is where the collapse happens. That's where sleep apnea is takes place. All right? And so I leave you with this. I published that case and I peer review journal. The opening line is worth taking home. Evidence suggests that sleep bruxism, that's teeth grinding, is centrally regulated. That means it's regulated in the brain and not in the mouth. And that the highest risk factor associated with sleep bruxism is obstructive sleep apnea. So when you treat your kids teeth grinding with a night guard, you're not freeing them of the sleep apnea risk. When you widen the child's jaws and the face, you open up the airway so you're getting them free of this airway disaster, that they're going to be stuck. And so athletically, scholastically, musically, socially, they will not do as well with this compared to this. Does that make sense?

100%, yes. Thank you.

Yeah, yeah. You can treat this at any age. But the earlier better. I would simply say that the earlier you treat this by getting the mouth straight, the more you can head off the killer diseases. Because heart disease still is the leading killer in America. We have 1909Americans die every day. It's not news anymore, right? Yeah. So here's how to do it right. For adults, you can relaunch your vitality. Same principle, just, you know, 30, 40 years later. But kids, you can do it right the first time.

Amazing. And I know that your books are available on Amazon and they can find you@holisticmouthsolutions.com as well if they want to go to your website. Anywhere else they can find you or anything else you want to share as we wrap up.

No, I think, you know, if you go with myofunctional therapy, that will steal you. Right, because this is where the earth is round. Folks are gathering airway. Okay, it's not so good face goes with good airway. That's how you there you can't separate them. Inside the mouth is the secret to your child's best face and the secret to your renewed vitality. If you take all kinds of supplements, have the best five star organic chefs make your meals and you have a choked airway, it's not going to be nearly as effective as you have a good airway. Put it another way, I can put you up in a five star hotel and I choke your airway. You will not come out at the end of one week doing nearly as well as feeding you fast foods and give you a big airway. Everybody understands that, but we're not doing anything about it. I'm telling you. Myofunctional therapist and airway mouth doctor combination, what's going to do it? Whatever your age is, as long as you have a sound natural teeth, then we can do it.

Amazing. Well, thank you so much for joining me again on the podcast. It's always so fun to chat with you and I look forward to everybody getting your books because like I said at the beginning, it's such a. You describe it in such a beautifully simple way that a parent can, you know, or an adult who wants to go explore this for themselves and or their child. It's very easily digestible and it's something that I think really lays it out very easily for parents to kind of go, okay, great, I know what to do. I know what my goal is. Now I just have to find that person in my area, you know, or close by to help me.

And you, you may, you may need to nudge your dentist and say, hey, look, how about going to get this training so that I can stay with you? Yes, I have to go to another doctor.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And then they can come get trained with you and everybody will be better for it.

So that's right. So do me a favor. If you find these books help you, please read, leave an Amazon review because that's how we help spread the word and build a tribe.

Absolutely. And we'll make sure that it's linked in the show notes so everybody can find it. And again, thank you so much Felix for joining me today. Always a pleasure.

Yes, the honor and pleasure is all mine. Thank you. Hallie.

Thanks for listening to this podcast. If you want to hear more of these Myo Tots, Airway and Feeding Relationships episodes, be sure to leave a review on Apple Podcasts or pledge a small amount on patreon.com the Untethered podcast. If you found value, others you know.

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