I am creating a hypothesis around a unique office visit.
A 24-year-old man presented at his eighth visit with unexplained pain in all of his teeth. His original complaint two months ago was that his jaws felt uncomfortable. He had been doing well in therapy by releasing many of his old football and other injuries.
Since he had braces in fifth grade, I thought that this may be a layer of his traumatic onion. I spent the visit releasing the strain in all of his teeth, which not surprisingly ran from his neck and trunk down into his pelvis. Dentistry is a full-body fascial event.
At the end of the visit, he said that the pain was gone and that his teeth felt like they did before the orthodontics. So I started to create a hypothesis in my mind.
The science says that the fascial web originates on the fourteenth day to connect every new cell of the body. Few people realize that all of the tooth buds for the twenty baby teeth and the thirty-two adult teeth are present in the newborn jawbones. Thus, the fascial web connects to every bone cell and all of the tooth buds in the jaws.
If there is little or no strain in the fascial web of the newborn, one would expect the tooth buds to more than likely hold their normal position in the jaws. But if birth trauma is causing strain in the jaws, one would expect that the tooth buds may more likely move out of normal alignment.
Let’s say orthodontics is done for a child in the fifth grade. If the fascial web is unstrained, one might expect the teeth to readily move into and remain in position. If the fascial web is twisted and tight, the body may more likely resist the new position of the teeth. This may explain the high incidence of adult orthodontic relapse.
Orthodontics may become a new layer of trauma in the fascial web that this patient is now revisiting. We need to look at connecting the dots between birth trauma and possible malocclusion or orthodontics later in life.
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