Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

July 18, 2020 - Dark Horse - Weinstein & Heying

01:50:36

Bret Weinstein and Mike Mew: The Roots of Evolutionary Dentistry

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	- Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast.
	I have the great pleasure of introducing you to Dr. Mike Mew, who is, I believe, the most famous orthodontist in the world, also the most hated person in his field.
	Am I correct about that, Mike?
	I would worryingly think that may be correct.
	Yes, and I must say, I know why it is that you're hated, and as much as they hate you, I feel very much the opposite.
	I think that you are a courageous man doing important things, and it is an honor to be able to bring this to a larger audience.
	So thank you for joining us.
	Cool.
	Sometimes I just think that I'm very stupid.
	Well, having been the kind of stupid that you are, I know what you mean.
	It's definitely not a great strategy for life, but it is an important strategy.
	It's necessary that some people do what you're doing, and very few have the characteristics to allow it.
	Yeah, I think that... I don't... I don't... No one, in their right mind, would actually put themselves into the position I'm in right now.
	So do you want to say a bit about what that position is?
	So I'm in an interesting situation where I, so initially I realised the issue when I was at university studying orthodontics.
	So clearly I, you can do dentistry without an orthodontic qualification, but I thought for me to do what I wanted to do, it was vital for me to have a good pucker orthodontic qualification.
	So I went to Aarhus University in Denmark, one of the top ones.
	And what I observed when I was, ...chatting to the staff and my colleagues and peers who were studying, is that the big gap was the etiology, the why.
	And it's always been my question.
	I was a kid, one of the kids that always used to ask why.
	And, you know, what is the cause of things?
	And then often I'll ask the why to the responses I get, and another why, and another why.
	I worked out this was the weak link.
	If you don't know the cause of the problem, you know, should we really be getting involved in any sort of treatment?
	Because in medicine, treatment is supposed to be about affecting the causes of a problem.
	I then had a letter writing campaign in the UK where I started with an editorial called The Black Swan.
	So you can look up British Dental Journal and Black Swan and Mike Mew.
	That was the article that I started with.
	The editor very kindly gave me the editorial and I wrote that.
	Now, I then had about sort of best part of five years of hard letter writing campaign saying, why are teeth crooked?
	What's going on?
	You know, we're treating all these people.
	It didn't really go anywhere and then I started by almost by chance I became an internet success.
	I wasn't really expecting it but I had several YouTube videos up, people started sending me emails and I was just sort of, it was quicker rather than responding to emails to put another video up, another explanation and this caught a thing called mewing started.
	Now it was It kind of surprised me that people would go to what is realistically an incredible effort, you know, to change your habits and craniofacial structure via changing habits.
	Matt, it's hard work.
	However, why not?
	The benefits that you can achieve by doing this are incredible.
	You know, basically, it's like saying get fit.
	You know, it's a tough thing to do.
	It's a tough thing to maintain, but why not?
	Well, let's orient people a little bit.
	I have been saying for years, where the hell is evolutionary dentistry?
	I know where evolutionary medicine is, and it is almost nowhere, but at least there is a formal recognition that there is something wrong with teaching medicine outside of an evolutionary context.
	A small number of people get that message.
	When it comes to dentistry, I have to almost literally bite my tongue when I go to a dentist or an orthodontist, because what they say about what's taking place just simply doesn't add up.
	It would take about 10 minutes to explain why the stories that we apparently tell ourselves about teeth are not plausible from an evolutionary perspective.
	And so therefore, this raises a tremendous question for all of those of us who have been exposed To dentistry and orthodontics, how much have we harmed ourselves by accepting these narratives and then following through to treatments that then have downstream consequences?
	It's just mind-boggling.
	I will almost hold back on saying what I think is the full extent of the harm that we've caused ourselves either by inaction or by the actions that medicine has been taking.
	Those two things and I think that it has affected an entire generation or more.
	Well I can say just so my viewers know why this is personal to me now.
	This year I had three teeth removed.
	I had two more that are scheduled and was postponed by COVID-19.
	And the reason for this is something called root resorption.
	Now I'd never heard of root resorption until I had a tooth shatter on me and then I had x-rays taken and it turned out that I have this condition.
	Well, it happens that this condition lines up with aggressive orthodontics, which I definitely had as a young person.
	So almost, you know, Brett, I'll take that back.
	When you put fixed braces, you know, with orthodontic appliances, it will cause root resorption on almost every single tooth.
	And that's just without aggressive mechanics.
	Right, so apparently I had no choice in the matter as a child.
	It was simply my parents doing what they had been told was necessary for my well-being.
	That cost a tremendous amount and then downstream I'm now suffering massive consequences.
	Right?
	Just terrible stuff where I'm going to have implants put in which is an awful process.
	And, you know, that's to say nothing of the financial costs, which are through the roof, certainly far exceeding what my parents invested in braces in the first place.
	And all of this is because orthodontics doesn't have a correct story about why the teeth are crooked in the first place, and therefore doesn't take the right approach to treatment.
	I mean, it thinks that I have some sort of genetic predisposition to crooked teeth?
	No, no, no, no.
	That doesn't make sense.
	So when I saw one of your videos explaining that you had also deduced that the story makes no sense, and going through all of the evidence, I was just... I was gobsmacked, to use the British term.
	Yeah.
	So do you want to tell us a little bit about why the evolutionary explanation that some of us just have a genetic predisposition to crooked teeth is wrong?
	Well, you know, our ancestors didn't have problems.
	I mean, I couldn't tell you if our ancestors had cardiovascular problems, whether they had diabetes or sleep apnea.
	We don't know.
	We think less.
	However, I know where their teeth were or still are.
	You can go into museums today and you can look at ancestral material.
	You know, only a thousand years ago, From all the Scandinavian remains recovered, everyone that had wisdom teeth had them working and in function, and that was most people.
	Now, today, having your wisdom teeth in is a rarity.
	We almost think that it's an extra tooth.
	I mean, the idea it's an extra tooth and we've evolved out of this.
	I mean, where does this fit with Darwinian evolution?
	It doesn't.
	You know, survival of the fittest is death of the weakest.
	Unless you go around killing people whose wisdom teeth come in, it ain't gonna change.
	And you'd need to kill a lot of people.
	You know, you have no idea how many times I've sat in a dentist's chair and tried to raise the point that the idea we have extra teeth that are in need of surgical removal is preposterous.
	And I just can't seem to make the point.
	All my fingers seem to fit on my hand just fine.
	That's so odd.
	I was just lucky, I guess.
	People like simple explanations.
	And of course, as I say, my catchphrase is, who makes money, a dietitian or a liposurgeon?
	Because fixing things you can charge for.
	Preventing things, particularly trying to change people, is not as billable.
	Yeah, I mean there's a perverse incentive that comes from economics and then on top of that, if there were to be widespread acknowledgement of how much damage is done to people by things like braces, A, there would have to be a massive course correction in what we do.
	I mean we've got lots of people running around with braces right now and I don't even know what the liability would be.
	So once you're down this road with a garbage explanation like bad genes are what causes crooked teeth, then it's very hard to get back to the right road and to treat things proactively by essentially restoring the natural condition that causes teeth to developmentally arrive in the right place.
	Is that fair?
	Yeah, very fair.
	I think medicine's very good at making course directional changes, if the course directional changes don't exceed a certain percentage, you know, a few degrees.
	Medicine is very bad at making a 180 degree turn.
	And it seems, you know, history is littered with these events where it was screaming that you needed to make a 180 degree turn.
	But people have got to admit they're wrong.
	And there's implications to that.
	And that's not likely to happen without difficulties.
	So, how much can you tell me about root resorption?
	Well, I can tell you that it seems to happen on almost every tooth that's bonded to a wire.
	What seems to be the problem is that the brace is dictating where a tooth goes.
	Artificially and the mouth wants the tooth to go somewhere else through physiology.
	Through a feedback.
	Through some type, some mechanism that is trying to determine where the tooth should be and of course most braces seem, this is my ballparking, it seems to me there's a bit of flexibility between the brace and allowing it to move between two positions and of course also when you put braces on The way your teeth bite together seems to be disrupted.
	And you're now biting in strange, different ways that's causing strange, different movements of the teeth.
	And, you know, when I want to get a steak out of the ground, I rock it backwards and forwards.
	Then it comes out.
	You know, and if you've got these strange motions on teeth that are bolted in places, you know, I think we have the potential for running risks here.
	So let me deploy the model I've got.
	It happens I have a skull here.
	I don't think it's human.
	No one I've treated, I promise you.
	This is actually a seal skull, but it'll do.
	So there, what I did not know, what I think of as the real story of teeth, is that our teeth are not directly bonded to the bone in our jaws.
	There's a ligament that attaches them.
	Is that right?
	We have what's called a gomphotic joint.
	Gomphotic joint.
	Gomphotic joint.
	The gomphotic joint is a very Tight joints, so it's not like the joints on my fingers that have a great range of motion.
	A gonfotic joint is just where you have a fibrous connection, in this case sharpie fibers.
	Basically that is what we refer to as the periodontal membrane.
	So the periodontal membrane anchors the tooth into the bone with a little bit of flexibility.
	A little bit of flexibility.
	And people who are listening to this will almost certainly have had the following experience.
	They will hit a tooth, not hard enough to dislodge it.
	They will detect that it is loose and it wiggles, and then it will tighten back up.
	Hmm.
	Hmm.
	This is the basis of orthodontics!
	Exactly.
	So the point is, we have built in a mechanism that actually detects where the tooth should be based on, you know, if a tooth is bumping up against another and there's pressure, it can be moved slightly.
	But in general, it sits in the right place with feedback from chewing and other such things, and only when it has been dislodged does it reattach.
	And so what orthodontics does is it takes advantage of this system and it puts pressure that's directional.
	And what happens is the tooth actually moves through the bone, breaking down bone ahead of it and building bone behind it.
	This is how your orthodontist gets your teeth to move in position and line up.
	And it's very effective.
	If you want perfectly straight teeth and you don't want to do anything, orthodontics will achieve it for you.
	Well, but apparently not stably.
	Apparently it comes at a cost.
	Well, there is that!
	Alright, so something about taking a tooth and moving it through the jaw I believe is very likely to turn out to expend this capacity.
	Basically, I was told The question I asked my orthodontist, or my dentist, at the point that it became clear that some of my teeth needed to be removed and replaced with implants was, well, I have my wisdom teeth.
	Can't we move my teeth forward now and fill in the gap?
	And I was told, no, it's too late.
	At the point somebody's your age, the capacity to move teeth like you could do in youth is largely expended.
	Is that fair?
	I mean, yeah.
	I mean, it's just decreasing.
	It's an exponential curve that goes down.
	You could do it.
	But if you need to move a tooth decent distances, you're going to lose a lot of the root.
	So if you're moving a tooth a distance, we talked earlier on about the jiggling sort of motion causing root resorption.
	There's another way to cause root resorption.
	The fact is that as the tooth moves through the bone, The bone dissolves in front of the tooth and it reforms behind the tooth.
	But to a small and lesser degree, the root of the tooth will also dissolve.
	The bone is much more dynamic.
	The bone has a far greater capacity to correct, rebuild itself.
	And the tooth has a lesser capacity.
	So you have a net loss of substance on the root of the teeth.
	So this is where your work and my work intersect because there is in these tissues certain to be a counter at the ends of the chromosomes called a telomere that sets your lifetime capacity for cellular replacement.
	Yeah.
	And if you expend that cellular replacement as you move teeth along the jaw, then it won't be there for maintenance later.
	And so I don't know exactly how that's going to play into root resorption, but my guess is my orthodontist, who was apparently too aggressive with my orthodontia, spent my lifetime capacity for tooth dynamics, and I am now faced with having An interesting concept.
	teeth swapped in to the places that my teeth were artificially aged.
	That's an interesting concept.
	I've not really cognated it from this angle before.
	Yeah, well, let's take it, let's put it this way.
	That's a prediction.
	I bet you if you look at people with tooth resorption that you will find in the place where the teeth are resorbing that their telomeres are also short relative to people of the same age group who did not have orthodontia.
	Right.
	That's the prediction.
	That's a prediction.
	I will wait eagerly to see if that comes true, as is many things in science, where you make a prediction and it can take some time sometimes.
	Boy, I've noticed that pattern.
	All right, so I think we haven't fully filled in this picture though.
	Your model, which I found quite compelling when I saw you run through it at length, involves a change in human behavior, especially around diet, that has caused a developmental program that in our ancestral environment would have made us have very straight, wonderful teeth, and it has caused them to come in in ways that they do not align properly.
	That's called malocclusion.
	Is that right?
	Correct.
	Okay, so can you describe what has happened to us, what you think the causes are, and what we would do to correct it?
	All right, well there's two principal things that have changed when we're talking about the structure of the whole facial complex.
	The first thing is we've gone from being So, having an incredibly rough, tough, hard, low-calorie diet.
	You know, populations were controlled by calories, you know, how much food they had.
	And people had to eat anything they got hold of.
	And often those things were really tough.
	We've moved across to this incredibly soft, Very rich calorie rich diet, you know, you could have so I'm quickly having so today was my starvation day So just before I had this I have to quickly have a little bit of drink with a little bit of sugar in it now I don't know how many calories I'm consuming in a relatively large cup but the effort that I do with my chewing system to gain those calories is next to nil and
	So we've gone from this tough diet to a very soft diet.
	We're not using our jaws.
	Use it or lose it.
	Now, I've got a strong jaw.
	How do you get a strong jaw?
	From using it.
	From chewing.
	Now, at the very same time that we've had this gross reduction in usage, use it or lose it, we've also had this change in our posture.
	So, most children now, in the first year of their life, will have several episodes with blocked noses.
	Now that kind of is normal now.
	And often that's several days.
	Now either you're going to lower the tongue off the roof of your mouth, separate your lips and breathe through your mouth, or you're going to die.
	There's no other way.
	Now, if you do lower your tongue, open your mouth and all the rest, there's a good chance that you're not going to go back to perfect oral posture afterwards.
	What started as obligatory need has become a habit.
	So, effectively what's happened to most of modern humanity is we've gone from beautiful posture, lips together, teeth in near contact, tongue on the roof of the mouth, but good body posture and good strong chewing muscles, to weak chewing muscles and hanging our mouths open.
	Now, if you've ever seen someone who's had a stroke, what you notice is one side of their face will drop down.
	Now, what I'm saying is modern humanity has had a mild to moderate bilateral, so we're talking both-sided, stroke.
	So everyone's faces have dropped down.
	And as your face has got longer, it's got narrower and shallower.
	Simple.
	Reducing the cross-sectional area.
	And that's where your teeth are on the cross-section.
	So, less space for teeth.
	But of course, less space for the airway as well.
	And that's the real crux.
	I mean, root resorptions, it's annoying.
	It's treatable.
	You can have those implants, but if you've got major sleep apnea at a young age, it's damaging.
	In what way is it damaging?
	Sleep apnea.
	So let's say if your face downswings, carrying your tongue that's attached here into your airway.
	It ages everything.
	You know, it's linked to cardiovascular disease.
	It's linked to diabetes.
	It's linked to cognitive impairment.
	It's even linked to ADHD.
	And when you talk about all of these subjects, these are lots of modern diseases.
	And so, you know, me saying, listen, my profession, the orthodontic speciality, It does not acknowledge any cause.
	It just doesn't know what caused the problems in nearly all of the cases.
	So why can't we engage in debate about this?
	Why can't we talk about it?
	Why can't we engage in the scientific process?
	You know, I've got this.
	I can call all around the world with one of these.
	It's amazing.
	How was that achieved?
	The scientific process.
	It works.
	Why can't we use this in medicine when we need to do?
	Why do doors get closed because people don't want to hear?
	Yes, I've been saying for, I don't know, a decade, maybe almost two decades, that medicine is taught, and I could say the same thing about psychology.
	These things are taught as if Darwin had never lived, and there's no reason for it.
	They're both fundamentally about an evolutionary system, and yet we teach it as if Darwin had never published The Origin of Species.
	And the same thing is clearly true in dentistry.
	Yeah.
	But what's difficult to understand is that I'm seen as such a charlatan within my profession.
	I mean, it's almost acknowledged.
	You know, I went to a lecture and a senior professor, who's deciding the curriculum of the largest dental school in the UK, He gave a lecture.
	He said many controversial points.
	He gave a good lecture, actually.
	At the end of it, I was fascinated by some of the things he said.
	So I went up to him and I said, look, have you got some evidence for the points you've just said?
	Now, what he wanted to say was, well, actually, we don't have very much evidence and dentistry for anything, really.
	However, he thought he'd make a little quib, a little joke.
	So what he actually said is, well, we don't even have the evidence to prove that John Mue's wrong.
	My father, who came out with the start of these ideas.
	So, in a way, he's using my father, and in effect me, as the gold standard of bad science.
	Yes, he's starting with the conclusion, which is... He's starting with the conclusion.
	And this is a guy, he sets the syllabus at the largest dental school in the UK.
	And that's just how deeply ingrained it is.
	And, you know, it's difficult to know where to go from that position.
	Yeah, so again, I've seen the same behavior in my little quadrant of the world with telomeres and the damage that has been done by allowing mouse evolution in breeding colonies to affect our models.
	So that our models are all distorted in the same way and therefore even the progress of science, even a well-done experiment doesn't tell us the right thing because it's using an animal that has evolved in response to very unusual characteristics in the laboratory breeding colony.
	My guess would be there are hundreds of stories like yours and mine.
	Things we are doing wrong because there is some school of thought that cannot consider admitting that it doesn't understand what's going on.
	That these things stand in the way of progress.
	It's very difficult.
	Medicine and an evolving science are very difficult bedfellows.
	I found that things got harder when I got near medicine because there was money, right?
	You can do evolutionary science much more fluidly if you're not near the money, but as soon as you approach anything where money is being made, suddenly it's an upside-down world.
	No, no, you're affecting people's careers, their status, and their, you know, their income.
	And don't get between a man and his wallet.
	Yes, although the thing that I naively thought before I had been put through the ringer myself...
	Was that although I could imagine most of the people in a field deciding to ignore some glaring, damaging error, I always thought there would be renegades who would respond to the fact that they could make a career by revealing what we were doing wrong and making people better.
	They could be heroes.
	And those people don't show up.
	I mean, they end up you.
	They end up dismissed as a Charlotte.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	I mean, thanks to YouTube, Facebook, all of these crazy things that have appeared out of nowhere, that is the only reason that I'm still working.
	That is the only reason you even know about me.
	And, you know, there was previously this chokehold that medicine was able to put by controlling what got published.
	By controlling what information most individuals will gain.
	And I give great credit to social media for, at least in the short term, it has broken the stranglehold.
	Well, the name of this podcast is the Dark Horse Podcast for a reason, which is that now we can bring to light all sorts of things that would have been true and would have been known by a tiny number of people before, but now we can actually bring attention to them, and those people, like you, like me, we are dark horses.
	Yeah, I guess!
	I mean, it's the reason I chose that name.
	I was just going to say that, you know, for me, I think one of the turning points for me to really focus, I mean, I had just completed a marriage, so I was at the end of a fascinating phase of my life.
	It was seeing my father and the rejection he'd got, and I just decided, you know, I'd had one foot in orthotropics, what I was doing, and I had more time doing conventional orthodontics, mainly on adults, so that I wasn't hypocritical within my soul.
	And then it was watching my father, and the difficulties he was had made me said, well, you know, even if I never make any money, Even if all I do is make a few people a little bit better, I have got to focus on doing this.
	Something, I don't know, I think it's probably the same as what people turning to the cloth centuries ago would call a calling.
	100%.
	And you go for that, and at the time, I didn't know YouTube was going to come along.
	I didn't know, I still, I'm only just turning this charity into a business.
	And it takes, you know, I did what?
	11 and a half hour day yesterday, straight through lunch.
	That's not uncommon.
	And today it'll be the same, straight through lunch again today.
	Going from what I've heard you say elsewhere, if you walk into a public area, a park or something, and you look around at the people, what do you see?
	Disasters.
	What does that mean?
	I see car crash after car crash after car crash.
	And that's another thing that really, really gets me going.
	You know, if you so take it, go and look, you know, go and look at some sort of David Attenborough in BBC documentary where he's with some relatively indigenous types people.
	And remember, they're only 50% what they would have been in the in the glory days of hunter gatherers.
	And nearly every single person, every single tribesman or woman, has really nice facial form.
	You know, almost exclusively.
	Space for all their teeth, space behind their teeth.
	I walk into a park anywhere, Europe, the States, you know, any developed country, and I see these sort of distorted craniofacial forms.
	I see people who have all kinds of
	Forms and shapes and I know how badly that is affecting their general health and that That just it actually scares me Because I know that every year This is getting worse again in my opinion I have to say this all the time because if I say anything wrong people are out hunting
	So, you're talking about an incalculable level of harm.
	There'd be really no calculating, if you think about it.
	No, there's no calculating.
	The degradation in quality of life.
	Yeah, I wonder what percentage of the healthcare costs are from a downswing in facial form and the subsequent sequali effects of that on the general health, particularly over a period of time.
	So that is a, I have to say, there is something tragic about the idea that you walk around and can see this in each person that you pass.
	And you know, I think your analogies are very apt.
	You say you see car wreck after car wreck, like bad reconstructive surgery.
	You see people who have the downstream effect that would be caused by a stroke.
	These are severe harms.
	Not so much.
	So what I'm saying is that as your face drops down on back, it's going to force you into a forward head posture.
	I think that is yes, we are spending a lot of time on these devices.
	All right.
	We're spending a lot of time on screens.
	Yeah.
	And I'm sure that's not good for body posture.
	But a lot of this is the fact that if your face has dropped down and back and almost every single person listening to this podcast has been affected and probably to quite a significant extent, And so as your face drops down and back, you have to hold your head forward.
	You are reducing the cross-sectional area.
	You're increasing your chance of sleep apnea, jaw joint problems.
	Most of the ENT problems are worsened because, you know, a structure that does not have the right architecture does not work correctly.
	Crooked teeth are just one of the signs of this underlying distortion.
	But there's lots of health problems and You know, the sleep apnea is always going to be the biggest one.
	But I have suspicions about several other things that I'm not making public.
	I'm not shouting about it because it just sounds too incredible.
	It sounds too ridiculous.
	Is there any chance that you want to quietly and privately share it with me and the couple hundred thousand people who are going to see this?
	A little bit.
	It's what I'm concerned about.
	I call this, the name I came up the other day is carotid constriction.
	So it's related to the carotid sheath.
	So I'm just saying that, you know, my concern is that as the face drops down and back, So it's a little bit like a waxwork model.
	You've got too close to the fire and you've just... And as it occurs, yes, your tongue moves closer to your airway.
	And yes, you're leading to more sleep apnea.
	But of course, also, this bulk is squeezing the carotid sheath.
	Now, I was fascinated by an Italian chap, I won't even try to say his surname, who was treating MS by putting stents in the jugular vein.
	And what he was saying is that blood is pooling in the lower brain, Hindbrain, and it's unable to get out of the hindbrain as well as it should be able to do.
	And by helping this blood to drain, he was putting a multiple sclerosis into remission.
	Wow.
	Amazing.
	And that interested me, and I was looking at the work of someone called Brendan Stack.
	And of course, what medicine loves to do is ignore outliers.
	It takes them as, oh, well, that's a random event.
	And, well, if you stop to look at some of the random events, sometimes, you know, there's a whiff of something interesting in many of them.
	And you don't ignore them.
	Try and make sense of them.
	But what Brendan Stack was doing was taking people who would arrive in wheelchairs.
	He would build them up with appliances in the mouth that opened their mouths up.
	And they would get out the wheelchairs and walk.
	And I thought, wow, I hear from other people that this effect wasn't permanent.
	However, in the short term, it was fantastic.
	Now, I was sitting there trying to make sense of this when I heard of this Italian doctor.
	And these made sense because the delay that Brendan was seeing was just about right for a blood effect and a blood neurological effect.
	So my idea is that what's happening is, particularly in the people who are attempting to use certain muscles in this area to swallow and maintain an open airway, who lack space because their faces drop down,
	They're constricting the internal jugular and that is leading to... This is with the suggestion where... This is, I think, the link between Alzheimer's and sleep apnea.
	They're both related to the same facial distortion.
	It's also the suggestion with some of these tics, you know, these tics people have, you know, when you're swearing in the supermarket because you've got a tic.
	You know, those are only suggestions.
	Um, and also one of the things that really fascinated me was, you know, I remember going to Thailand years ago when I first qualified and everyone had beautiful skin and straight teeth.
	Then I went back a few years later and I noticed a few people had braces and it was just amongst the few people with braces that they also had some facial acne.
	And the facial acne was limited precisely to the drainage of the lymphatics from the face.
	Now, that lymphatics is also going down that same carotid sheath.
	So my suggestion is we've got this constriction on the carotid sheath that's leading to other problems.
	But again, you know, I want to hold back because, you know, I don't want to sound like I've got the cure to everything.
	No, no, no, no.
	Don't worry.
	You're among friends here.
	This story makes a great deal of sense to me, which doesn't mean that you've got it right or wrong, but I know this style of thought is the one that solves big problems.
	Lots of stuff is going to be downstream of the same single error, and trying to make sense of the outliers will tell you how it works.
	Yeah, and also the other thing going down this carotid sheath of course is the vagus nerve.
	And of course, if you squeeze the vagus nerve, you're going to ramp up your sympathetic system.
	And what do we notice in so many people today?
	They've ramped up their sympathetic system.
	The parasympathetic, that calming effect from the vagus nerve.
	They call it the vagus because it's the vagabond.
	It's the traveller.
	It just goes off all the way around your body, particularly to the internal organs, calming them down.
	And I think that the problem with this whole thing is that if you put someone in you lie them flat to put them in a scanner You ain't gonna see it Because it's only affecting when you're standing or you're a supine and you're engaging these muscles to maintain an airway
	That story also makes sense to me, that there's a bias in the way we study things, and it is predictable that anything that runs afoul of that bias will be mysterious for much longer, right?
	Anything you can't see lying down will not be discovered by this method.
	No.
	No, it won't do it.
	That's the problem.
	We sometimes don't stop.
	There seems to be a lack of rationality.
	When you look at astrophysics, astrophysics is divided into two sort of groups.
	You have your experimenters and your theorists.
	And it's a wonderful science where people are pushing forward ideas, ideas change.
	It's amazing what, from this tiny little speck in the backwaters of one galaxy, we have managed to work out an incredible amount about our galaxy.
	But we've done that with this mixture of experimenters and theorists.
	When it comes to medicine, where are the theorists?
	Well, you've probably worked this out yourself.
	No wrong, Tony.
	In my field, there are no theorists.
	And the reason that there are no theorists is pure economics, right?
	Theorists are the key to moving evolutionary biology forward.
	But what we've got is a system in which the incentives inside the university prioritize expensive experiments which require big grants because the overhead goes to the university and it builds the buildings and all of that.
	A theorist who basically needs pencils and access to the library doesn't bring in big grants and so the university doesn't want to fill a spot with them.
	So what we've done is we've had a kind of a coup where the empiricists have taken over and there's nothing wrong with empiricists, we need them.
	But you need them paired with theorists.
	And so instead of doing that, we say, well, theory is something you do in your spare time once you've done your empirical work, which of course turns the philosophy of science on its head.
	And there's nothing that says a good empiricist is going to be a good theorist.
	You can't be someone else on your part-time.
	Right.
	It's not a hobby.
	Theorist is a hard job.
	It just doesn't look the same as running experiments.
	What we're doing, we've got so many facts.
	I'm not saying that research is coming up with the wrong answers.
	I'm saying we're just not reflecting on the facts we've got and trying to make sense of them.
	There's a lack of discussion.
	There's a lack of logic.
	And the problem, as you said, you know, this empirical basis of evidence that's being built up, it's just not being reflected on, it's not being considered.
	And that's what we need badly.
	Yes, we need, so the way I think of it is synthesis, right?
	Synthesis is the act of taking data generated in experiments and combining it with theory and figuring out what the new model is and when you So, these phrases like, well, what do the data say?
	Right?
	Or, data is king.
	These things sound so right, because they sound like an embrace of the idea of empirical science, but they're actually part of an overthrow of theory by empiricism, which is not science.
	That's just observation.
	Anyway, it's a chronic problem, and its root is so mundane that nobody even notices it, which is the way we fund universities is about experiments that cost money, and so the administrators have gotten so efficient that we can't think clearly anymore.
	It's a disaster.
	Yes, I mean, we do have slightly different structures here in the UK.
	Probably not so much in the university, but when it comes to providing health care.
	But, you know, I think we've got a lot of... We're not questioning things enough.
	People aren't questioning everything.
	You know, you cats, I think, therefore I am.
	That's all you can say.
	You know, interestingly, one of the famous scientific philosophers was Karl Popper.
	And he lived literally, if I point my finger, he lived about two miles, if not less, over there.
	Actually, he claimed to be in the town next door, but it was, I think, this town.
	And he, you know, he said the point that, you know, you can't prove anything.
	You can only disprove things.
	And trying to make certain that this never escaped medicine, and medicine never went back to prove it, he put the null hypothesis.
	So his group made the null hypothesis and they put the null hypothesis.
	So whenever you make a scientific paper, you try to disprove The null hypothesis.
	Yeah, you've tried to falsify the null hypothesis.
	However, of course, we now just have the null hypothesis, and we have completely forgotten why we had the null hypothesis.
	It seems an enormous irrelevance.
	You know, I ask sometimes, you know, if I'm at a conference and I'm walking around amongst the posters, and I will do my sort of annoying spot conversation with someone on, what was a null hypothesis for?
	Why did you do that?
	What's the history of that?
	How did that come into science?
	Right.
	They've skipped the philosophy of science and then they've told themselves lies about why it's no longer necessary and we've got more sophisticated methods.
	It's very dangerous.
	Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, I, you know, we all look at the world from our own position.
	Now, I think that the medicines Lack of... how do we say this?
	So the croniofacial dystrophy and its effects and the fact that from inaction and from the wrong action has possibly caused an issue of historic significance.
	You know, I see this, it's just, it's utterly incredible in my viewpoint.
	The sequence of health effects that have been caused that I think are completely preventable, completely confrontable.
	However, in my viewpoint, this is going to rattle on getting bigger and bigger and bigger.
	And from this, it's going to give the, The ability or the situation where we could gain some real change and I mean, I guess that's what Karl Popper was thinking when he put the null hypothesis in.
	However, I really look forward to the ability of trying to gain some good proper sensible change in medicine.
	So, let me ask you about a couple things.
	One, I have a hypothesis, almost certain to be wrong, but you're probably the only person on earth worth running it by.
	I was wondering, one of the things I don't think we have great information on is how our ancestors slept.
	We have some information on how people sleep, even hunter-gatherers in modern times, but a lot of the information I believe has been lost.
	I'm wondering about the effect of sleeping on pillows with your face down, potentially, or your head cocked to the side.
	Is that having an effect on malocclusion?
	Yeah, I really... I would suggest that if you have an asymmetric position where you routinely sleep, yes, it could have an effect.
	However...
	It's one of those things where I don't have enough information and I'm sitting on the fence processing at the moment.
	You know, I'm seeing some of those Egyptian things.
	I mean, you know, these Egyptians had these ceremonial things that were a bit sort of like this.
	A little bit shorter, about like that height, I think.
	They were cut on one side that they would put behind their heads when they slept.
	That was emulated in quite a few different cultures.
	And the idea of a pillow and resting your head on something seems to be really deep in literature.
	You know, really quite deep in ancient literature.
	And fables as well, which is interesting.
	My sister is a physio and she says to me that one of the good things of sleeping on a hard surface is how you have to move around.
	So you're not, you're not in one position, you're physically having to move.
	Then I'm looking at the, you know, you go into ancient churches in England, or even fairly modern churches in England, you'll have these reliefs of people, so these models or statues of people, lying down, often with their sword right down in front of them.
	Suggesting you're lying on your back.
	I remember going to... I had the chance to go traveling before the internet and before everyone else and their dog decided to go traveling and it was a fascinating period and I remember going to this particular event.
	I was in South America and I was amazed at how people would just Lie and sleep.
	Sometimes across their goods.
	So if you had a bag of stuff you wanted to take to the market, you didn't want someone nicking your stuff while you're asleep.
	So you would sleep on it.
	In a sort of bent fashion or a twisted fashion and I couldn't get over how these sometimes relatively mature people were seemed so flexible when they slept and it just didn't seem to fit with the sort of pattern we're seeing where man if you don't have a beautiful mattress you're going to throw your back out.
	Well these guys were sitting bent over backwards with their legs twisted and on one side and their head like that and Seemed fast asleep, perfectly fast asleep, and I didn't see anyone wearing neck braces.
	Yes, their muscles are protecting their skeletons, whereas ours have atrophied because our sleeping surfaces are too soft.
	Yeah, well, I mean, there was a distinct lack of mattresses.
	Yeah, mattresses are frankly a preposterous concept.
	You're trying to make life soft because you've got a problem from being soft.
	I had a similar intuition and at one point considered whether I would just simply be considered crazy if we got rid of our beds and moved to hammocks because once you figure out a hammock it's actually quite a good way to sleep.
	I mean from a lot of perspectives.
	From a thermal perspective.
	It was interesting but remember when the sailors used to use hammocks they would have a cushion That would be semi-circular to sort of flatten it out a little bit.
	Not a great deal, I don't know.
	So they were trying in that era to sleep on a slightly flatter surface.
	My thoughts would be sleep on the floor.
	Well the thing about a hammock is, and it may not be as easy on a ship, I'd have to think about the geometry.
	But the way to use a hammock is actually diagonally, right?
	So you are flatter.
	You know, that U shape isn't quite right, but if you sleep kind of across it, it works out very well.
	It takes some getting used to, but there's a lot to recommend it.
	Yeah, but I've tried with patients, getting them, and I always say, you know, I have to caveat all these suggestions before everyone listening goes out and does it, that with some supervision, preferably some professional help, you just start sleeping on the floor, you know, you start by going down, and we call them carry mats, the sort of things you would go camping on, you know, get three of those, maybe four, start with that, then gently take them away,
	You know, a lot of the time, because your skull, sorry, your vertebrae have become so distorted, it's going to take time to unwind that and level everything out.
	You know, if you see someone who's hunched over all the time, their vertebrae will be wedge-shaped.
	And that person can't suddenly sleep on the floor.
	It's going to take a little bit of slow manipulation to get your vertebra fairly square again.
	And that, you know, but a floor is an excellent way to start exhibiting change.
	So if you can sleep on a floor, then you've got in eight hours of training every day.
	Every 24 hour period, you've got a third of it based on training to be straight.
	And Brett, one other thing, you know, when we're talking about prevention, you know, the exercise, I try and get people to do a mealtime exercise.
	And I say that we want a positional exercise because, a situational exercise, sorry.
	Because it's great, you know, you can go to my functional therapists or a myelogist and they'll teach you how to do a perfect swallow.
	But most kids learn the perfect swallow, but they never really do it.
	Because it's almost compartmentalised, these exercises.
	So what I'm suggesting is people have a mealtime exercise because that's situational.
	They're going to be sitting on a meal.
	And the exercise I recommend, and this works.
	It's elbows off the table.
	Sit up straight.
	Eat with your mouth closed.
	Chew your food properly.
	Don't speak when you're eating.
	And take your food.
	Food comes to you, not you to your food.
	The only other thing I add is you've got to do a chin tuck, because most people have got forward head postures, so I make them chin tuck when they swallow.
	Now, not much of that is new.
	And when you stop and reflect, Almost every single culture on the planet recommend and has recommended exactly this for generations.
	And there's a reason for everything.
	And because it works.
	And I think where we had this period between the end of Hunter Gathering When we became subsistent farmers, before we started to really civilise, I mean really the Industrial Revolution, when...
	Things weren't so bad.
	You could go wrong, but if you followed some simple rules, some dictums, then you could make certain that your child would grow to be straight.
	And before we had modern medicine, you didn't have anything to fall back on.
	So you had to do it yourself for your child, because your child was going to be your pension.
	So, you know, you made your child sit up straight, and of course You still had that possibility that things would go wrong.
	Now we talk about the village idiot.
	Right.
	Who was the village idiot?
	Well, we've got this idea of a village idiot, sort of with the ears sticking out.
	That's the classic adenoidal face.
	Here the tongue attached behind the mandibular symphysis, you know, this bit.
	Well, we know that one of the most statistically significant measurements for sleep apnea is the distance between here and the back of the throat.
	The shorter that distance, the higher the chance you are of getting sleep apnea.
	We know that if you've got an adenoidal face, that distance reduced.
	We know that people with significant sleep apnea when they're children, their brains don't grow as well.
	And that's well shown.
	So here we have...
	The village idiot.
	Someone that didn't do the right thing.
	And it won't... Today, you don't notice the village idiot.
	Because almost everyone looks similar.
	But a couple of hundred years ago, they stood out like a sore thumb.
	And there the parents could go, I don't want you to end up like that.
	The wind will change and your face will set like that.
	Right, these are, so I have a category that I call literally false, metaphorically true.
	And these are beliefs that are not accurate, but if you behave as if they're accurate, you do better than you would if you behave according to the fact that they're false.
	And so, the idea that your face will freeze in this position isn't mechanistically right, but it means that if you keep doing that it becomes habitual, and it's the equivalent.
	Yeah, yeah, you know.
	I mean it's, you know, there is wisdom in certain cultural things.
	I am saying little more than stand up straight and shut your mouth.
	Well, you're saying a couple things.
	You're saying the way to avoid this problem in the first place is to behave in a way that your great-great-grandmother would have understood to be the right way to behave in the first place.
	But you're also successful at treating people who have quite distorted faces.
	I've seen the before and after pictures that you have shown, and they're dramatic.
	You haven't seen anything yet.
	I'm holding back evidence for the right moment.
	I mean, I'm getting much better.
	I'm constantly getting better and better.
	And I got some adult results.
	So if I put them out, I'd be just, I'd be a riot.
	Well, there probably would, you know, because we are achieving things that people just didn't think was possible.
	It's almost as if the world doesn't want to believe that their facial form is as malleable.
	You know, that image that looks back to you from any mirror in the world.
	I mean, who are you?
	If someone asks to meet you, who are you?
	You'd have to produce evidence of who you are.
	Which would be a document with your image on it.
	The image of your face.
	That is, in many ways, a definition of who you are.
	And people just don't really want to believe this thing that they think, their identity.
	It's an insult to your identity for this thing to be so malleable, so changeable.
	And in a way, it's not that it's not changeable, it's that you and your parameters and posture and function, that's not changeable.
	Your habits are less changeable than your form.
	Well I've heard you say that people are resistant to the idea because if they are just simply stuck looking the way they are then it's not their fault but yes if they could change it and don't then it is their fault and I have to say that that resonates yeah well it's a double whammy isn't it that your face didn't grow well and it's your fault yeah But shouldn't this change where we come to our children?
	The fact is, maybe you can't do anything about your face at some advanced age, but the really difficult thing to think about is your children, at the point that they're born, aren't damaged yet.
	All you have to do is not screw it up.
	Okay, I'll put a little caveat in that I'm surprised how many newborns I'm seeing that aren't correct.
	To what do you attribute that?
	Well, I'm fascinated about that.
	I think that a couple of things.
	First of all, well, the average woman giving birth is now considerably older.
	You know, I don't... I would be fascinated to talk to a proper... someone who probably knew, but I would imagine that in...
	Prehistoric, so in Paleolithic periods, you would have a partner within a distance, maybe six months, a year after your first period.
	I would have no idea, but I would imagine this was a marker within the cultural society.
	But basically, if a lot of people were dead by the time they were 30, you had to get cracking at a much younger age.
	Although clearly it's an emotive comment to suggest young girls should be having babies.
	But certainly women are having babies older now.
	That's certainly true, and you're on the right track.
	Women would have matured later.
	That date has moved to an earlier point in life because of the plentiful resources that we have.
	But you are on the right track.
	Most women would have had very few periods in life because they would have been in a state of amenorrhea For much of their lives, either because they were pregnant, because they were lactating, because they didn't have enough resources to produce a baby.
	And so, yes, there would not have been long periods of fertility in which women were not engaged in some part of reproduction.
	You know, so family planning is a wonderful thing in the sense that it liberates women from this, but it It does have consequences, like being able to put off childbearing until so late in life that your body may not be up to it in the same way.
	But also, and these people wouldn't be as fit.
	Well, they aren't.
	You know, modern mothers are not going to be as fit as their hunter-gatherer ancestors, because the hunter-gatherer ancestors were younger and more active.
	Absolutely.
	So you've got, I would imagine that the fetus, the child, is resting far further down in the pelvis because of that.
	So that's my one.
	Then mothers aren't moving as much.
	That's number two.
	Then they're sitting, which was, you know, I'm sure people did sit, but they also squatted and they were on the move.
	Whereas, you know, a lot of working people now are sat in one position For long periods of the day.
	So that would be number three.
	And then we're going to get on to some of the modern diet effects and things like this that I'm not as familiar with.
	But I've been trying to throw ideas to suggest why.
	Would we be having babies born that help having really, you know, great form and great situation, a good situation.
	So then if I can amend my point from before, it may be true, it may not be true that you can protect your children completely by just, after they are born, having them behave in a way that will not cause these problems, but you could protect your grandchildren Right, if your children behave in a way that... Yeah, we'll stay with children for a second, Brad, because I think for 90% of the population, we're spot on here.
	And what interested me is I often see people who are born with fetal moulding, so you're moulded as a fetus in the womb, particularly if you've got twins, it's very common, spontaneously correct to a huge degree in the first three years.
	So at the moment, I'm not making comments below three years old.
	I'm just leaving it blank.
	And I'm saying, I don't know, it's a little bit like sleeping position.
	I'm saying, you know, I'm gathering information.
	I'm fascinated.
	I'd like to learn more.
	I'm not going to open my big mouth till I've got a few more facts and I'm a bit more certain.
	So if you're born distorted, you're still likely to correct if you have the right influences.
	There is good evidence, and I've seen, anecdotally, some really nice improvements, particularly with asymmetry, from fetal moulding.
	But, you know, there's a lot of things you can do.
	I mean, are you familiar with the baby-led weaning movement?
	I don't think so.
	Okay, so the baby-led weaning movement is that purees came around after the Industrial Revolution when women started going to work, and of course it was important that we have equality and we engage the full labour force.
	However, all of a sudden, women not being at home, mothering or nursing their mothers with breastfeeding, as we would think, what, 24, 36 months?
	You know, this is a sort of numbers of a thrown around.
	If you're going to stop that early, the sort of natural conclusion was you've got to give baby something soft that they can eat.
	And I think that's kind of where baby food came from.
	But I think that... I just... I kind of think it's this assumption.
	We all have the assumption that these poor little darlings are so delicate they couldn't survive.
	You know, they can't miss a meal.
	They've got to have clockwork bedtimes.
	You know what?
	Those humans, they're pretty hardy animals.
	They've done rather well, actually.
	They're not that delicate.
	So the idea with baby led weaning is you go directly from breastfeeding to solid food.
	So you have this transition phase when you rely on breast milk for nutritional value while you start ramping up hard food.
	And you start giving, so if anyone's listening to this, you know, a good way to start it is you cut the veg that you're going to eat up into chunks one and a half times a baby's fist length.
	So that a bit, so if a baby picks it up, a bit will stick out one side or the other side.
	And they can nibble on it.
	This is important to understand.
	You're not expecting the baby to get their full nutritional value.
	You're just expecting baby to enjoy the food.
	And it should be the same types of food that you've got on your plate.
	Because that's what the baby wants to do.
	And baby's going to have fun with food.
	You're going to use the breast meat for nutrition and you're going to watch in the nappy that you might call diapers but the correct name is nappy and you're going to look in the nappy to see what output is going on so that you can gauge how much of your nutrition is now from milk and how much is from solid foods and then you make a progress straight through to solid foods and you never give slops.
	Makes perfect sense.
	Yeah, so when I looked at my nephew, who was a classic example, he had two big cheeks.
	He would cry, he would poo, he would eat and sleep.
	And that was it.
	And when I watched him feeding, these muscles, the cheek muscles, were basically the most important and powerful muscles in his body.
	That did everything.
	Getting food on board was His goal in life at the time.
	And I was amazed with his buccinators and these big cheek muscles.
	Now, babies and cherubs should have big cheeks.
	Anyone over the age of four should have hollow cheeks.
	And again, I think that we accept this chubby cheeks.
	And they're not, it's not fat.
	It's muscle.
	Because if you don't have to do something, it's unlikely you will.
	Yeah.
	We're lazy.
	Well, let's do that part right.
	Our ancestors were deprived of food almost all the time.
	They didn't have enough.
	Yeah.
	And because of that, there is a strong desire to limit the use of calories that can be preserved, right?
	Because a calorie saved is the equivalent of a calorie found.
	So, we are wired to do all kinds of foolish things on the basis that we are preserving calories that we actually don't need and would be better off to burn.
	That's a holdover from evolution.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yes.
	Yeah, absolutely true.
	I mean, you know, we're programmed to be lazy in a certain way.
	So, but infants have a very different, infants suckle.
	And that's a very different pattern from an adult swallow.
	And if you don't have to make that transition, you probably won't.
	I remember suckling, in the days when I was still eating wheat, I remember suckling a Big Mac.
	It wasn't very pretty, it was a bit messy, but I managed it and I suckled the Big Mac.
	I just, you know, used a suckling time action until I'd got the whole Big Mac in.
	It took a bit of fluid, but you could do it.
	And I think that most people still suckle, you're swallowing, so...
	Use this musculature when they swallow and we've never made the full transition.
	And that's baby led weaning.
	Preventing that from happening.
	Let me understand what you're saying.
	You're saying that because we skip this phase where babies should be learning how to deal with solid food, that we learn to eat solid food with the mechanical approach that we would take to a liquid food.
	In other words, when somebody purees the carrots, they turn it into what we would Eat as as we would breast milk the suckling reflex continues, and it gets developed into a kind of What to say a kind of chewing that is effective enough to get the food ground up and digestible, but it does the wrong things to our faces and Yeah.
	So, you know, we're supposed to move from the infantile suckle to an adult swallow.
	And I think we get about 40-50% of the way there.
	We modify.
	You need to bring the teeth into action.
	But we're using our facial musculature.
	So we're using the facial nerve, not the trigeminal nerve, we want to get complex, in our swallowing process.
	And I think that's causing deeper problems than we would otherwise imagine, but particularly it's upsetting the balance.
	So when I do, and I'm not the best, sometimes I do a bad swallow, I do a little bit of... But if you do a proper swallow, there should be nothing.
	Whereas you see so many people, Doing this sort of thing.
	Now, if you're sucking like that multiple times a day, every day, eventually you're going to pull everything back.
	And most people, if you take a ruler and you line it from the tip of the nose to the tip of the chin, a huge number of people have sucked that whole segment back.
	You're sucking the teeth back.
	Well, you wonder why you don't have enough space for the teeth.
	Or your wisdom teeth.
	Then you suck the tongue space.
	So the tongue now has to rest closer and closer to your airway.
	And that's just endemic.
	When I walk down the high street again, victim, victim, victim.
	And they're not even aware of this.
	Parents think.
	It's like puree food.
	It's the go-to.
	You know, when are you going to get pureed food?
	You know, when we had our first child, several people gave us some more bottles of organic pureed food, which I binned.
	Good man.
	All right.
	So let me ask you a couple more questions.
	I mean, unless you had something you wanted to... Well, I was just going to say that a couple of other things that I've noticed is that we've now got sugar in everything.
	Now, you either put on weight, you lose weight, or you stay the same.
	Now, if you're going to stay the same, or the same trajectory on your percentiles as a growing child, and someone gives you a sugary snack, so they give you your sugary snack, you eat the sugary snack, now you're going to eat less other things.
	So the net effort you're going to go to has now decreased because you've had some easy calories.
	And I think that's endemic now in society.
	That we don't have to make as much effort to gain the calories that we're consuming to survive.
	And then the other one was, well, when I was at school and I would be walking along the street with my hands in my pockets, you know, like this, a teacher would come on, smack me around the head hard, say, hands behind your back, stand up straight, get going.
	They would now get sacked for doing the same thing.
	When I was young, you went into classes, you all sat up straight.
	Now you go in and these kids look like they're having a Sunday afternoon movie session and no one's saying anything.
	No one's saying stand up straight.
	Yeah.
	You know, and, and, and yeah, only a hundred years ago, people were growing with far straighter teeth and better facial form.
	Go and look at the moon, go and look at, you know, go and Google beach and 1960 people were slimmer.
	They had better facial form, and I mean we're watching everything just in front of our eyes.
	It's one of a dozen pieces of evidence that this can't be a genetic problem.
	Yeah.
	It can't have, since 1960?
	No way.
	No.
	No.
	So, okay, where are we?
	I want to ask you a couple things.
	One, I am now in an uncomfortable place with my children's orthodontia.
	My children have been told they need braces.
	My younger son, actually, is about to have his braces removed, and we have had the idea sprung on us that he needs a permanent retainer in order to hold the teeth in place.
	Talk to me, Dr. Mike.
	This is one of the ones I don't like talking about very much.
	Okay.
	So I get so many people from around the world saying, um, who's doing what you're doing?
	And the answer really is no one's doing what I'm doing.
	My father noticed these problems.
	So my grandfather I bought Weston Price's book on nutrition and whatever it was.
	I can't remember.
	But Weston Price had an interesting book.
	He made some great observations.
	My father can remember the place in the road where they were when my grandfather told him about the book.
	And this was before my father had even finished school.
	So my father knew about it, and my grandfather did some little bits of orthodontics, kind of based on this concept, which my father was interested in.
	And my father then, he came up with this idea of orthotropics, he came up with the idea of it being not a genetic, it was an environmental condition, and how you could affect it.
	But remember, back then, people stood straighter.
	People were educated to stand and sit better.
	Food was a bit tougher.
	There was less refined carbohydrates.
	So I inherited this system that was starting to struggle.
	And to be honest, you needed an incredible patient.
	And you needed to be an incredible orthodontist.
	And when I committed to coming down here, I thought, right, how can I make this simpler?
	Because it's not swinging.
	You know, you can't do this.
	You can't expect everyone to become superhuman.
	And of course, you don't make money if you need to see people that many times.
	That's... So I now have... I'm getting there.
	I really have.
	I've made big, big moves.
	And you know, as I said, my results are getting better, a lot better.
	But then how can I apply this for other people around the world?
	Because people are constantly asking me, Mike, I live in... Blurdy, blurdy, blurdy.
	Is there someone around me who can help?
	I've looked on the orthotropic map.
	There's this person.
	I've got to say, no one yet is doing what I'm doing.
	And I have literally risked Everything!
	I've sold the house, taken inheritance, burnt the lot, risking my life and skin.
	But again, I don't know why you do these things, but you get a passion, you head off on this passion, and I've more or less got there.
	However, I'm worried about everything.
	I'm really worried.
	I'm really worried about all the people around the world.
	Now coming back, okay, sorry for that preamble.
	Now let's come back to your child.
	Okay.
	Now the problem is that if you have the structure that was informed by your posture and function, Maybe manipulated by orthodontics slightly.
	It's very hard to change your posture and function in the structure that was informed by your posture and function, because it's reminding you to have the same posture and function.
	Self-reinforcing.
	Self-reinforcing.
	So, what you've got to do is get people to change their habits.
	Now, one of the simplest things to do is chew gum.
	I know it's not what It's not fancy, it's not attractive, it's not, you know, it's not this wonderful treatment I can offer people.
	But chewing gum builds up the muscle tone.
	In time it works.
	Also, of course, trying to get your tongue up on the roof of the mouth.
	So I gave this lecture and people started the mewing movement based on that lecture and the information I gave out.
	It works, but it takes a huge amount of personal commitment.
	However, your son now has been told they need permanent retention.
	Now let's think about, let's dissect, Those retainers, for a second.
	So, the teeth, the bone and the gum rest in a balance between the lip and the tongue.
	Great, well we know that.
	That's the system that we, that most, the other 5,400 species of mammals are using to get straight teeth.
	That's what our ancestors used to do the same thing.
	If you need a retainer, that retainer is going to hold the tooth out of the balance zone.
	And you can do it.
	That's what a retainer does.
	However, you can't hold the bone and the gum out of the balance zone.
	So in time, what's going to happen?
	The teeth are going to be left without the bone and gum.
	Now, that's not going to be good.
	And so I've been waiting, for years, I was waiting for a periodontist, a gum expert, and an endodontist, someone who works with the roots of the teeth, to contact me.
	Now about four years, three years ago, a periodontist contacted me saying, I can't believe That, you know, I'm doing surgery on people and they've got damaged gums and bone all over the place.
	I met a girl, so I went for drinks after work and a friend came along and he brought his dental nurse with him and we're having a chat and she said that she was doing weekend work with a forensic dentist.
	And the forensic dentist is getting to look in places where most people don't.
	So this is someone who identifies dead bodies.
	And we frequently identify dead bodies, if you don't know, by looking at their teeth.
	Because clearly a teeth is a really... When someone's very badly decayed, teeth is a really good way to identify someone.
	And he's looking at these dead bodies, and of course it's going to be a selection of people, you know, of different ages.
	You know, you're going to get lots of young teenagers as it happens.
	And he'll be looking and he said it's almost like these skulls are completely different species than the skulls I did my medical training on.
	And he's seeing what we refer to as dehiscence and fenestrations.
	That's where the root is bulging out of the bone all over the place.
	And that's from holding the teeth out of their balance zone.
	And of course, lots of parents will go to their orthodontist.
	They'll say, I don't want you to take teeth out.
	So the orthodontist says, that's fine.
	We've got lots of methods so we don't take teeth out.
	And they'll widen the dental arches.
	And they'll take them out of the balance zone.
	And then you have a retainer that holds them out of the balance zone.
	Now, I don't want to criticise people not taking teeth out, because I believe in not taking teeth out.
	But if you're going to expand and move someone's teeth out the balance zone, you'd better get that person to change.
	Because you'd better change that balance zone.
	Here's the thing, the child in question, I've become very attached to him.
	It's not like I can just go get another.
	So what can I do for him?
	What should I say to this orthodontist?
	And then what should I say to this kid?
	And if I need to make him change his behavior in order to rescue his dentary, I'm going to do it.
	It's just, I mean, okay.
	Start.
	Change.
	The easiest thing to change is your function.
	Okay.
	If I go to the gym, I can pick up my gym bag.
	I don't have one.
	I can go to the gym.
	I'm not a member.
	However, in theory, I could do that.
	And I would program myself to go and do some function.
	So, example, I will ride my bike home because I'm forced to take the bike home.
	I force myself to do a function.
	Functions you can force yourself to do.
	Posture is you.
	It is very hard to change your posture.
	Now you've got to change posture and function.
	So what I do here in the clinic is I widen people's jaws.
	So I gain structural change to help them to change.
	And then I put in feedback mechanisms.
	Simple Pavlovian feedback mechanism.
	If you drop your mouth open, it hurts.
	Now pretty soon you start to change.
	It's a little bit like I lent you a big belt buckle with a spike that came to here.
	You're going to stand up straight?
	Sure you are.
	But hopefully you can learn a lesson to be different.
	And a lesson learnt can last a lifetime.
	Because if you do someone's homework for them, You always need to do it.
	If you straighten someone's teeth, you need to hold them straight forever.
	If you do it artificially, you've got an artificial retainer.
	Now, for your son, simply working on stand up straight, shut your mouth, chew hard food.
	However, I find it very difficult to really embody this message upon people.
	The phrase, give me a child till they are seven and I will give you a man.
	Under seven, you can change people.
	They're very malleable.
	You can change habits, you can change patterns, you can change behaviors.
	Seven, eight, nine, ten, it's getting more difficult.
	Try and change my habits and patterns and behaviors now.
	That's hard work.
	So, may I ask how old your son is?
	He's 14.
	Yeah, you see, it becomes... What you've got to change now is not here, it's here.
	You've got to change his desire to change.
	If he gains a desire to change, then he'll do it.
	You know, look at these mirrors.
	You know, it's all there.
	I have provided enough information for anyone to gain significant health benefits for free.
	So... I mean, you know... If I... Are you telling me that the right course here is to tell the orthodontist to get stuffed Not go with the retainers, and get my kid to do this mewing movement stuff, that that's the right method?
	If he does it.
	Okay, but that's what I want to know, because that part I have a great deal of influence.
	If you could engage him, so I frequently say to people, if I could plug into you like they did Keanu Reeves in The Matrix, and I could plug you into my computer, and I could update your parameters, that is all I would do.
	No more, no less.
	But remember, I could upload French and Latin and Russian and, you know, the history of antiquity if life was that easy.
	And in a way, us growing up is about us learning those things.
	Agreed.
	So here's the thing.
	Fortunately, my son is like a proto-supergenius.
	All I have to do is show him this podcast and he will understand what he's being told.
	And he's dreading this retainer, so if there's a method... Well, my suggestion is that what sort of retainer?
	One fixed behind the front teeth?
	Or one that comes in and out?
	I think it's the lower one they want to do fixed and the upper one they want to do removable, which I'm afraid he won't even use.
	Well, okay, get the lower fixed because that will keep the aesthetic gain Long enough for him to engage properly with the mewing.
	Okay, and what do I do with the upper?
	If you wanted a perfect result, you would go one or two weeks with no retainer, It's just let things settle a little bit, because one of the most important things is that your bite is comfortable.
	If your bite is not comfortable, you won't engage your full muscles.
	And if you're not engaging those full muscles, well those muscles are the single most significant important fact in facial change.
	So if I understood you correctly, you leave it for two weeks because actually you don't want to hold it in the position that the orthodontist moved it to, you want it to find the most natural position nearby.
	Close.
	Exactly.
	Then you can take the mold, then you make the retainer, and then what you do is you slowly wean yourself off that retainer.
	While mewing.
	While mewing.
	And as a top thing, don't get a retainer that covers the teeth because that layer of plastic between the teeth is jacking them open, preventing all night that comfortable bite.
	It's comfort Mike, but the big word I've got to now is comfort.
	People will do things that are comfortable.
	Redirect comfort and you're in with a chance.
	Okay, now I have another son.
	He's about to get braces.
	I should just call that off and go full force on the mewing, am I right?
	Yeah, the problem is that, again, it's getting people to actually enact change, you know.
	The number of people who come to me saying, oh, I do, I've got online consultation, and they go, yeah, my lips are together all the time, my tongue's on the roof of the mouth, I've got beautiful body posture, I'm chewing all the time.
	I start talking to them and I go, lips are apart.
	Carry on, lips are apart.
	Lips are apart.
	And what they realise, as I'm saying this, is that they haven't really changed.
	They've changed when they're thinking about it, when they're observant about it, but we just need a deeper level change in that.
	Right, but in the case of my older son, I'm in an even better position, because I can tell him he needs to do this, and if he doesn't do it, I'm getting him braces.
	You see what I'm saying?
	It's the perfect incentive.
	Yeah, I mean, um...
	There are other systems that are simple.
	There's many different systems that will simply widen the dental arches, give a little bit more tongue space.
	That can help you to change.
	So we make certain compensations.
	So once we've reduced tongue space, we make a range of different places where we place our tongue.
	And that gives us the types of crooked teeth.
	So when we talk about a class 1, class 2, class 3 or deep bites, these various different things that orthodontists talk about, I believe that that's not genetic.
	It's more likely to be a comfortable, a range of comfortable places where you can place your tongue after you have a reduction of tongue space.
	Now there may be some genetic tendencies in how you respond to this problem, which of course, if you do your numbers, you'll start seeing genetic shadows.
	The other thing is you've got a forward head posture.
	So now, if you bring your teeth together, force the tongue on the roof of the mouth, you're making a compensation or you're unwinding a compensation.
	If you put your chin back, now you're unwinding a compensation.
	Well, of course, it's going to be uncomfortable.
	To maintain this, because now your tongue is bulging back into your airway.
	That's why you made those compensations in the first place.
	Well, you are not going to sit in discomfort, particularly discomfort that affects your airway.
	You won't do that.
	So widening the tooth arch is reconstructing an ancestral state.
	It's desirable.
	In one dimension.
	In a simple singular dimension.
	It's just helping to create more tongue space so that you can unwind those compensations comfortably without this huge desire to return.
	So you're not arguing against all appliances.
	You're arguing for some and against others on the basis of ultimately trying to restore this ancestral condition.
	You just need to think.
	Work out what you're doing and why.
	Before you blindly just sort of wrap braces around everyone.
	You know, as a zealot, you're disappointing me.
	That sounds very moderate.
	Well, what I don't like, what I really think is a problem, is when you have braces on the top jaw, braces on the bottom jaw, whatever types of braces, preventing the teeth meeting together comfortably.
	Because then you're dissuaded, so you've got a negative feedback to biting hard.
	I mean, I don't know, my uncle used to go shooting pheasants, you know, with a shotgun, which he called, with buckshot, he'd call it.
	And I remember going around for dinner once and chewing away on a bit of pheasant, and I love a bit of pheasant, and all of a sudden I just froze solid because I've got a little pellet of buck, a buckshot, between my teeth.
	And it's amazing that you're exerting big pressures with your teeth and all of a sudden they stop.
	Yeah.
	Because you've got an inhibitory feedback.
	Well, if your teeth don't meet together well, you've got inhibitory feedbacks.
	What I was saying earlier on, if you get a stroke, your face is going to change because you change your muscle usage.
	Well, slam in some inhibitory feedback mechanisms on all of your masticatory muscles.
	Well, it sounds a very similar game to me.
	So wait, wait, wait.
	Let me understand what you just said.
	We have a circuit that protects us.
	If you bite down on something hard, you'll crack your teeth.
	That has big implications for an ancestor who broke their teeth.
	Cool.
	Go back to that periodontal membrane, that gonphotic socket we talked about earlier on.
	That gonphotic joint.
	In that joint, if you excessively stretch The tissues, you know, the fibers, they will send a feedback mechanism, a pain feedback mechanism, straight through to the pain center and that will inhibit what you're doing.
	And it has to work very quickly in order to protect your teeth from breaking.
	Exactly.
	I mean, how many times, you know, I've burnt my fingers on hot things.
	You know what?
	I avoid doing it now.
	I've learned.
	Yeah, it's a trainer.
	Yeah, it's a trainer.
	So what you do is you very quickly bring your hand back because you've burnt it.
	Right.
	So the second part of what you're saying, you've got this thing that protects your teeth if you bite down on something hard, which our ancestors would frequently have done.
	A little rock here or there.
	Yeah, yeah.
	They really did chew hard and hard things.
	I mean, look at the surface of their teeth.
	Yeah.
	And they have chewed hard things.
	So, if your teeth are such that they don't occlude properly, then you're sending that signal.
	You've just bit down on something hard, which arrests proper bite and prevents the whole thing from giving proper feedback.
	Yeah, you're just not using the muscles.
	And of course, half of the cause of the problem in the first place is you weren't using the muscles.
	And so many times when we're focused on trying to rearrange the deck chairs in the Titanic.
	You know, everyone gets a nice view of the band, but, hmm, is the deck moving?
	So you rearrange the teeth, and you're focused on this, and you're not feeling it.
	If a patient comes to me halfway through orthodontic treatment, one of the things I will always do is feel the biting muscles, you know?
	And I'll tell you, if you've got a child in orthodontics now, try it.
	Put your fingers on the biting muscles like this.
	Four fingers horizontally on the occlusal plane.
	Bite hard together.
	And see how much of that muscle is activated.
	And I frequently find that half the muscle won't activate.
	It's there, you can feel the muscle mass, but it won't fire off because it's being inhibited because the teeth don't meet together comfortably.
	All right.
	Well, I'm getting the picture.
	So I have a last question for you.
	I understood you to say in one of your talks that your license is jeopardized.
	Tell me about this.
	Uh, okay.
	So it was, I was putting up informational videos on YouTube.
	You know, people were asking me and I was putting the videos up and I was giving my opinions and it was becoming very, very popular.
	And it is now very... As I said, I don't know how many orthodontists get stopped in the streets, but I get stopped on the streets a fair bit.
	So, this was upsetting the status quo, so the British Orthodontic Society have referred me... They're a club.
	They're a club, you know, they're the orthodontic club.
	They're not important.
	They have now thrown me out.
	And they've also referred me to my official body, the General Dental Council, on a number of these videos.
	Of course it is a problem here because I'm going to be when you go to court when you go to the General Dental Council it's like a court and so I have a expert who's in prosecution and I have an expert who's in So you have a prosecution and a defence expert.
	Well, the prosecution expert is an orthodontist who's very, very certain I'm very, very guilty and a very bad man.
	And the defence expert, well clearly he is an orthodontist because you don't have any orthotropist experts and he thinks I'm Pretty bad, and I probably am doing all the wrong things as well.
	So, you know, it's a strange and interesting situation.
	I also have two clinical cases.
	One is a mother that thinks what I've done is incredibly good for her child.
	She's absolutely singing my praises.
	And they're taking me to court over it?
	I mean, it's a bit strange.
	And another one is a child I didn't actually treat.
	I set her up for someone else to treat.
	So they're having a go at me about the objectives of what I wanted to do.
	So it's not about whether I did the treatment right or wrong.
	It's about the philosophy.
	So what they're trying to do here is they're trying to get me on that I'm doing the wrong thing.
	And it's interesting, you know, it's rattling on three years now for when the first thing started going.
	And, you know, it's silly how much of my time energy this takes.
	It's silliness, it's craziness.
	I mean, you know, we have no idea what the cause of this is, and yet both experts throwing in comments that I mean really strong wording you know like I know this is wrong it's been proven it's set and yeah I will have to see how this goes but it's um I hope I'll get a fair shout I hope I get a chance to say what I think.
	What happens if they rule against you?
	Bye-bye.
	Really?
	Mmm, I can't practice anymore.
	And so of course what the annoying thing is having just You know invested everything that I have into a treatment method and making it better.
	I would lose all of that so here's the thing Mike that can't happen and What's more?
	I have listened very carefully to what you've put online and I was expecting to hear that Kind of cruddy evolutionary analysis.
	I expected, based on what you were saying, that you would be right, but a lot of what you were going to say was going to need cleaning up.
	That's not what I heard.
	I heard somebody who nailed the evolutionary analysis.
	Thank you very much!
	So, in some sense, I think you need a witness on your behalf who's capable of saying that, credibly, because Like it or not, they are engaged in malpractice if they're coming after you.
	Not only are they wasting your time, but they are threatening to harm your patients if you can't work on them.
	Yeah, that has been, um, that is a suggested, um, argument by one of my patients who's saying you are going to take away my right and my choice to have what you're providing, Mike, if they stop you from working.
	And have you contacted... you said you had some contact with evolutionary medicine.
	Do you know Randy Nessie?
	I've heard of him, but he's slightly... I'm slightly down the food chain, should we put it, from Randolph Nessie.
	Well, I don't know about that.
	I know Randy.
	He was a mentor of mine when I was in grad school.
	I think he would find this fascinating, and I'm almost sure he'll end up seeing it.
	So, Randy, I'd be very curious what you hear in this discussion.
	And I think it's about time that evolutionary dentistry was born, and you seem like the right guy to herald in that era.
	Thank you very much.
	I do think, as I have mentioned before, I think that evolutionary medicine is woefully, and I mean woefully, under-recognized.
	Yep.
	So a slight detour for a second.
	I think that if I was run over by a bus tomorrow, I would want modern acute medicine on my side.
	There is no shadow of a doubt that it's incredible.
	Yep.
	However, if I have a chronic illness, I think we could almost say by definition that modern medicines failed.
	At least not for the aging ones, you know, for a good chunk of the middle ground chronic diseases.
	Modern medicine should really say, hello, has anyone got any better ideas?
	And most of those chronic conditions are related from the mismatch between how we evolved to live and how we do live.
	We all know that if, you know, if you're unfit you get fit and you work to get fit.
	If you've got type 2 diabetes there's a good chance it's related to what you do, your diet.
	And this goes on all the way through chronic medicine.
	Chronic medicine is about, you know, you can't change people.
	You can't make them change themselves.
	Pills aren't going to work.
	And we need To really learn the lessons that evolutionary medicine can tell us on a broader perspective.
	Oh, across everything.
	We have an epidemic of evolutionary novelty, and it's killing us.
	Yeah, literally killing us.
	Literally killing us.
	And your distinction, which I love, between acute medicine and chronic condition medicine is right on.
	But it extends across a wider range.
	Civilization makes us very, very safe from acute hazards.
	And any sort of subtle hazard that can disappear into complexity, it just throws up its hands.
	It's a chronic problem across the way we analyze hazards.
	Yeah, and it goes beyond the diseases we're talking about.
	I mean, you look at stress levels.
	We look at patterns of work.
	We're looking at relationships between families and groups.
	You know, it's a huge chunk of modern society.
	would benefit from the lessons of evolutionary medicine.
	100%.
	Precautionary principle.
	I believe that a great poster child for evolutionary medicine is this particular issue.
	I agree.
	Because in a way, it affects more people than most diseases.
	Because almost every household in the modern society will have at least one child that needs orthodontics.
	That probably has sleep apnea, tonsils, adenoids, other ENT problems.
	So it's how it affects everyone and the gross mismanagement, in my opinion, brings it to the fore, brings it to the light.
	But what we have to do to overcome this issue is consider the fact that our faces haven't grown to their full potential.
	Well, I think that's an excellent place to put a bookend on this podcast.
	I think it's been eye-opening.
	Even though I had seen a great many things you've put out, I learned a lot from this.
	I would like you to come back and keep us apprised of developments in the story.
	And can you tell me, for my viewers, if they want to dive in right away into your material, what's the best video for them to look at?
	I think the one that gives the best overview would either be Modern Melting Faces at the Ancestral Health Symposium or Growing Your Face on the 21 Convention.
	Remembering that the 21 Convention, I did that video for young people, so that's aimed at a specific target.
	So my YouTube channel is called Orthotropics.
	If you want to engage with us or me or my father or many of the other people within this field and you're a professional, so you're a medical professional of any description, you can go to the Facebook page called, Facebook group called Orthodontics.
	If you're a patient or not a medical professional and you want to engage with us, you can go to the Facebook group called the Craniofacial Action Group.
	And if you simply blog my name, I mean the concept.
	So I did not come out with the term of mewing.
	That has grown.
	It's organically grown and I want to keep it as something that is a movement of its own.
	I don't, I'm not interested in controlling it.
	I do want to try and push it in a scientific direction.
	Because I think that I need people to take good records.
	I need people to really analyze.
	Use the scientific process.
	It works.
	And trying to get the most... Because we can help people.
	We can help a lot of people.
	So far, the Mewing community, the advice they give looks pretty good to you?
	I mean, I haven't been keeping abreast of it recently, but generally so.
	Be careful.
	Look at the warnings.
	I've got a video out there called warnings on, you know, mewing warnings.
	And yes, I mean, people are doing good things.
	I'm seeing some incredible results from people.
	I mean, shocking changes in facial form.
	And if you're under 25, it's amazing what you could do.
	And you're over 25, you might not get the changes in facial form, but remember that there was a Stanford meta-analysis looking at swallowing and chewing exercises showing a 50% reduction in sleep apnea in adults and over 60% in children.
	And that, I think, that those exercises were less effective than most of mewing.
	So you can really make some health gains.
	Real big health gains.
	And again, what I'm saying boils down to little more than stand up straight and shut your mouth.
	Well, this is terrific.
	Mike, I feel that you are a gentleman, a scholar, and a patriot to humanity.
	And anyway, I appreciate what you've been doing and that you've been sticking your neck out on our behalf.
	So thanks so much for visiting the Dark Horse Podcast.
	Well, thank you very much for taking the time to help raise awareness of these problems.
	Wonderful.
	Be well, Mike.
	Okay.
	Thank you very much, Brad.

▲