Hallie Bulkin, a practitioner/educator, explains using myofunctional therapy (MYO) to address oral habits. She describes cases where improving tongue posture and function removed the biological need for thumb-sucking or nail-biting, producing spontaneous habit cessation and reducing stress associated with forcing habit elimination.
I always talk about this like, it's funny. Back when I first started teaching, like, MYO myself, I really was more driven by, like, eliminating oral habits initially. But at the same time, I was working with patients where they weren't having success in these, like, thumb sucking elimination programs or nail biting elimination programs. And I was like, well, I'm not going to not do MYO with them. Let's just do it and see what happens. Because I was taught, like, you had to eliminate that first. And then I started realizing, oh, my gosh, these kids that are going through MYO and basically graduating a MYO program, if you want to call it that, are no longer engaging in their oral habits because now their tongue is up, it's doing the. Doing its job. They have no need for this like that. And a lot of times I feel like those noxious oral habits are serving a biological need. They're serving a purpose. So to just try to, like, eliminate it without actually addressing, like you said, like, the root cause, the underlying issue, it's not serving anybody. If anything, it's probably stressing their system out more, right?
What I Was Missing in Feeding Therapy: ARFID, Airway, and Myo with Samy Hernandez
