Hi everyone, and welcome to another video.
Hi everyone, and welcome back to Airway First, the podcast from the Children's Airway First Foundation.
I'm your host, Rebecca St. James.
My guest today is the one and only Dr. Sandra Kahn.
A graduate from the University of Mexico and the University of the Pacific.
She has over 25 years of clinical experience in orthodontics and has been part of the craniolfacial anomalies team at the University of California, San Francisco, and Stanford.
Her graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley, was on physical anthropology and human craniolfacial growth and development.
She practices pediatric sleep apnea prevention and whole body treatment, addressing body and oral posture to develop stronger jaws, which fit all 32 teeth and house large healthy airways.
She is an international lecturer, publisher of two books, and has translated Dr. John Muse, the Causing Curator of Malocclusions, into Spanish.
She is currently the only diplomat of the American Board of Orthodontics that practices exclusively, Bioblock Orthotropics, and is the co-founder of Project 015, which proposes addressing airway growth from preconception until the end of the year.
She has been a part of the project for over 15 years, and has been a part of the project for over 15 years.
You can find out more about Dr. Kahn at forwardontics.com.
And now, let's jump into my podcast with today's guest, Dr. Sandra Kahn.
Great. Thank you so much for joining us today, Sandra. I appreciate it.
My pleasure.
Before we begin, for those that don't know, you're not just a provider, but you're also an airway parent.
So if you wouldn't mind just sharing briefly a little bit about your airway journey with your doctor and Dr. Muse.
Well, I don't think I have myself as a provider anymore, unfortunately, because I don't have bandwidth to do everything that I'm doing.
But yeah, the issue that I had started with mostly my son, who was as a baby mouth open, and I mean, I look at videos and I can't imagine why I left him so long with the mouth open.
But I just didn't know what I know now.
But he was starting to snore and he wasn't overweight and he had every symptom in the in the book from ADHD to irritability to poor attention.
And, you know, he, he, he was just not sleeping well and not breathing well.
So I started and I went through everything and I noticed it on this. I really didn't have any tools. Fortunately, he didn't have a malocclusion.
His teeth were not and his jaws were not didn't look like there was a problem.
I mean, the problem I would say, okay, I'll fix the problem and my brain would have saved it. That will take care of it. But because he didn't have a tooth problem.
I said, okay, he doesn't have a tooth problem. I don't have anything to do.
What's happening. Yeah.
So I started going around. I was at the time this is the early 2000s.
I was asked to write a book in Mexico of just orthodontic questions like orthodontics for dummies. And so I was writing it.
And I should I shared with my colleague and friend Barry Raphael.
And he looked at it. I said, can you take a look and make sure I'm not missing anything. And he looked at it and said, send it. Go check out John.
You when, when you see what he's doing, you will write something completely different.
And sure enough, I went and it just turned my world around because when I saw the first photo of a girl that really had bad jaws.
And next she was a gorgeous model. And I said, I want to know because it was a long faced girl, very hard to improve.
If she came to me in my office, I would have said, my best case scenario is not to make her faith worse. There's no way I can improve it.
I just don't want to make it worse. And the improvement was insane. It was just a photograph and I bought his book.
And I read it, covered to cover. I was in Great America with my kids, not great. One of the ones where they go swimming and I was sitting there reading my book.
I couldn't put it down. John Meos, the cause and cure of malocclusion.
And I say, well, why isn't everybody knowing this? Why has this been this guy been working 40 years and nobody knows.
Nobody knows. Actually do this. And that rocked my world and I started, you know, doing every single thing to my son.
He was my guinea pig. Bless his heart. He's first born a pleaser. So he was willing to do everything.
He developed, he invented the bow because everything that I put on him, he felt this is not good enough.
And I said, well, if you're so smart, you tell me. And he said, you have to go from here. And he pointed at his chest.
If you don't anchor for my chest, how's my face going to come forward? If you anchor for my face, there's no way I can come forward.
And he was a nine or 10 year old kid. And I say, why does, why he gets it and none of us get it.
How can you face forward by anchoring from the face, right? Doesn't make it.
It was like the king's invisible clothing, right?
One kid says, what's going on with this profession?
And, you know, I was just blessed with two kids in the two extremes.
So I was able to experiment with those. So now I know what happens with a kid that you focus early enough and you get him right.
And he cooperates and he does everything as he needs to do. And a girl who fell under the radar because her breathing was nasal breathing was okay, but she still had bad posture.
And she wouldn't cooperate and she'd want nothing to do. They did not want to be in mommy, Pini pig.
So she grew up and at 15 years old, she had double jaw surgery.
She's fantastic. So I have the case of the surgery. I have the case of the hard work for years and years and years.
Yeah, you left your boat.
Yeah, my son wishes he would have gone my daughter's way actually.
Really?
Yeah.
Just because how long it took for.
How long it takes and how much effort and the substand the result you get because at three years old, the upper part of our head is 80% for right.
Mm hmm.
I really change it. I mean, you can improve it. Yes. And there's Dr. Mules, the son goes through mulling and all this stuff that can make it better.
If you're okay, it can make you better. But it's not going to fix you.
You got to think of surgery after and I said three years old. So my my focus now is the first 1000 days of life.
Yes. Yes. And that's a great book, by the way.
Yeah.
If you go into the 1000 days, you can get things 100% right.
Wisdom teeth, airway, growth, nerve neural development, you can get everything if you do those 10,000 days properly.
But on one side, doctors are not giving the right guidance and parents are in safety. They're afraid of their children.
And you've got a discipline has been part of humanity. Humans, modern human has been in this planet for 300,000 years.
300,000.
Modern history.
Modern history of man is a tiny portion of that.
And the industrialized life is a tiny, tiny, tiny portion.
Right.
And here 300,000 years fighting against gravity, fighting against the fallen tree, fighting against the vicious animal that can kill you and your children would send their kids out of the cave to say, you know, 50% chance they would not come back.
So they have to be vigilant. They have to be toned. They have to be strong. They have to know what they're doing from birth.
Right.
Within 100 years, we kind of took all that one.
And we took it away and we are going to suffer for it. And parents don't get discipline. I give them a pacifier to parents and they go, well, my baby doesn't want to take it.
And I say, well, maybe your baby has a no problem.
And they come to the office and the office I take my screen and I said, if you take it, the cartoon plays.
And they take it and they get the bubble in and they're reading right. And I said, he can take it. Oh, we don't do screens.
They will you do screen just when he's wearing this properly for this.
Or do playtime or do something. You've got to figure it out. And I think that's that's the hard thing you as parents.
And you've already said it and it's funny because every podcast it comes up.
We don't know what we don't know. Right. Parents didn't know.
I feel so bad for every one of you that went through medical school, dental school.
You don't know you spend all that time. You don't know.
And so now here we are in this huge just microcosm of destruction for lack of a better word since the Industrial Revolution.
And we're having to pick up the pieces. Nobody knew.
So here we are. And as parents, yeah, that's going to put a little more on us on us.
But you have to do it now that now that you've heard about it and now that you know about it, you have to take the steps.
You no longer can say I don't know.
I mean, that's just that's your job. You just got to.
Mom, it's that the parents are overwhelmed. Doctors are overwhelmed.
Sure. Everyone else. Yeah.
I was just telling my friend yesterday.
We have to pay taxes.
Taxes together did not have to pay taxes.
We deal with the live where you have to pay taxes.
There's so much stuff and and and you know, the date line and the date and everything's speeding up.
Everything's beating up right. You're in your house. You can't be alone.
Your phone is there. There's stuff on the TV. So it's like everything is different. It's constant.
So we need to simplify things and give people things that they can actually do because life is overwhelming.
And people talk about holistic about I hate holistic because it's more and more things to overwhelm people.
And yes, the doctors are amazing, but they're not doing the right the right thing because there's for profit medicine.
But there's also for profit holistic stuff. It's all for profit.
Right.
I did a consultation with the with the mom yesterday she had three kids.
It's already spent over $10,000 for each one of her kids. The youngest one is nine in the holistic side.
And three kids are a disaster. I mean, I the the amount of empathy that I have a parent that has spent so much money that it's yelled to the children, do your mind function exercises, do this, close your mouth and the good will of the families and the time in the table.
They're trying.
Yeah.
Do that is just so draining for parents for families for children.
We just we just don't have a path. And that's what I'm committing to giving people a path that is respectful.
And has a clear beginning, a clear and a price tag, a timing and an expected result.
So I want to talk about that a little bit. So first of all, I'm going to show this and we'll put links to it in our in the show notes.
And I already told you beforehand, but just, you know, full disclosure. I don't tend to geek out on your very often.
But you're one of the guests that I am geeking out about because this was literally one of the first books I read when I got to calf.
And Man, it gave me all the fields. So first is a mom of two.
Devastated some of her going, yeah, I miss that. I miss that. I miss that.
You know, I had one that was a mouth breather when she slept.
And I'm looking at all the issues she has. Then I have another one who seemed fine when she slept.
But we ended up going down the retractive. Let's pull teeth and let's, you know, and I'm throwing up flags that my ex has been going, no, please don't do that to her.
I have this book. Please read this. We're not going to do that.
So I was able to catch some of hers early enough. But and then, of course, I'm reading it going, oh, my gosh, this is me.
So phenomenal book, Jaws. Every parent, if you haven't read it, please read it every physician. Dennis, if you haven't, please read it.
The stats are frightening. I'm not even going to bring up the stats.
So you write this book, you put it out there, and it really is. It's a change, right? It was a line in the sand. Here's where we are. Let's change.
So now I'm looking at your website and there's some tools, thanks to trial and error on your son, that are out there now that are available for parents.
So let's just kind of shift and go over there if we could. I would like to start with the pacifier.
And before every parent clicks us off and says, oh, no pacifier. Don't click off yet. Please listen.
It's a very different concept and a very different goal.
So can we can we talk about that one a little bit?
Yeah, we have to to understand where we're coming from to be where we're going.
And I've dedicated, I mean, Jaws came out in 2018. So it's been six years and I've dedicated myself to try to figure out, like, John Mew says, come on.
Like John Mew says, cause and cure, right? If you don't know the cause. And the cause is really the nose.
And it's not that the nose is sick, because we don't even have a nose doctor. We paired out traditionally the doctors with the ear and the throat righty.
So the nose is being overwhelmed with a lot of stuff, not necessarily allergies, not necessarily sickness, just new stuff.
And the nose is in the center. Why do you put anything in the center if it's not super important, right?
Right.
We know our nose is the gatekeeper of health. So the first thing that comes obviously our skin but the first thing that comes in and you probably appreciate that having had some some throat issues yourself.
You want to make sure what goes into your body is the right stuff to go in. You want to coat it with the stuff like nitric oxide going through the nose.
And anybody listening to us now can do the easy, you know, test of taking a breath through your nose and then taking a breath through your mouth.
It feels completely different.
It does.
Through your mouth, it's called this rough, it's nasty to your nose, it's warmed up, and it's gentle and it feels right.
And when I do it, I also don't hear the flim that's the and I realize I'm different, right, because of my condition, but through the mouth, you hear it catching on the flim and the scar tissue on my right, but you don't through the nose.
It's quiet. There's no blockage.
Yeah, the nose first has to be optimal.
The good news is that our NT Dr. Michelle was amazing.
He's a Mexican artist.
If anybody needs an NT, he's my go to guy.
He says he's neurologist and pediatric NT. So he says form follows function.
His function is right. The shape will become right.
But there's always a but only doing growth.
Only when we're growing, okay, we're growing.
It reverses function will follow form. If the format not right function will adapt to that new form.
So if the first 1000 days of life, we don't push this function to be perfect, then the shape will not become what it needs to become.
So we got to focus those 1000 days. And one of the new book is called knows. And one of the things we quote over and over and over is childhood is short.
It is short. It's obviously it's important, but it is finite. So it has a beginning and it has an end.
Once it has an end, it's irreplicable. It never comes back.
Yeah.
Very short with a very clear end. And when it ends, you don't get a second chance.
So it is a scary thing to say childhood is short, finite and irreplicable.
That's just the way we're made.
Yeah.
What do we want to do with that information? We have neural pruning. What is neural pruning? You know what neural pruning is?
I do not. What is neural pruning?
I can't even say it.
Yeah, the term is self explanatory, right?
Neurons get pruned like your plants. So what happens during the neural pruning throughout life? We have several, but we have very critical ones in early childhood.
And that means the neurons in our brain, we are born with billions and billions and billions or trillions. I don't know.
And I mean, there's a number, but I don't have enough.
But those neurons are not yet connected.
My brother said when his child was born, oh, they're born without software. There's hardware, but there's no software and they get the software as they grow.
So we have all these neurons that are doing nothing.
And as we do think they start connecting. And we have a period where the ones that didn't get connected, they get removed.
And that is neural pruning. You can look at it.
And so in the old pencil literature, there's a very large one at seven years old.
Okay.
I think it's the largest although there's still a lot of research going on. There's another one in adolescence, but the one at seven years old is very critical.
This is why you can do a lot of things like learn a language without an accent.
Any language you want before seven years old.
Okay.
And then you learn a language you always struggle with the accent because you don't have the same new. But before seven, you have so many and if you learn three or four languages, they connect.
Like I can very easily learn languages because I grew up in a family with four grandparents with four different languages.
Yeah.
My neurons got connected. So I can learn very quickly a language where some people that never learned it's like like magic to them for me.
And I want to create more neural parents and we have those thousand days where so many neurons, they go from very few being connected to we can almost see the electricity in this babies when they are born because there's so much going on.
Yeah.
And it's urgent that we recognize those thousand days and we do the right thing and we teach parents first not to be afraid of the children, because children rule I see all these 18 months all that in the process of winning in the parents don't know what to do with them because they are under slapped.
They are the bosses. I mean, parents didn't go to say one of my old assistant calls her baby lady boss, her baby lady boss.
They, they rule the whole. Why because we're not giving parents to not because parents are bad. They don't have the tools but discipline can be loving can be right.
And that's very to for these kids to go right. So 1000 days to do it. And once it's finished. No pressure.
We are going to be patching up. It doesn't mean you're going to be messed up if you're listening to you when you have a, you know, a five year old, because there's still a million things you can do.
But to really, really be 100% right you need to focus in those 1000 days have to be critical. Not like my husband used to call the breastfeeding Nazi I'm not a breastfeeding Nazi.
I breastfed my daughter to three, but many parents cannot receive and that's not the end of the world. Of course it's ideal.
I didn't know that the breastfeeding on the breast was so critical. I bought a fed my kids with my president, because I knew the chemical composition of milk was very important was important right.
But what about the delivery and the same thing with the chewing and the same thing with the weaning the weaning for me is critical part, the 18 months old pacifier.
And where the tactic is, how, how do you, how do you bring into solid foods is critical, because we've reversed a lot of things and our research is pretty clear that we go from liquid.
So, as we develop us babies, the larynx comes down it's part of when we start speech that's what Jared Damon called the, the greatly forward, we gave up, like primates, don't choke, but they can pronounce the same phone sounds that we do so we
can use the ability not to choke in exchange for getting very sophisticated with our language and communicative skills. That's how we became human. When you become an adult, when you grow and you go into your adult following
and the trade that larynx is much lower. So we are able to choke. And I made easy to follow drawings of how an adult follows, because we when we understand that then we know there's a window of opportunity to teach our kids to chew.
You're listening to airway first, the podcast from the Children's Airway First Foundation.
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And now let's jump back in to today's interview.
Music
And we are lazy. We are wired to look for comfort so we can survive, right?
When we were in the cave time, of course, there was not a lot of comfort. So, you know, we had to be wired to find it because it was lit from sugars, fruits that would find in season.
But as we made life a lot more comfortable, there's too much comfort. Just like, you know, if you walk, your legs are not going to work for you. Same thing with your chewing.
And the window of opportunity is when you start winning a baby, going to the soul food, that food, that book is great because you want baby lead, you want the baby to grab the celery and chew it and understand that baby is not a joke.
The baby is going to negotiate what goes down the throat and possibly cough. I have some good videos of babies doing that as a vigilant parent that knows CPR.
I always say you've got to do that CPR and you've got to be vigilant. You can't just throw it to the child and go do something else, right?
Right.
So, you know, they're not going to be vigilant. Give them stuff they can grab, watch them, and they start negotiating with their tongue, with their muscles, with their neurons that are connecting.
So, there's so much we can do on those thousand days. It's, we just have to be dedicated to those thousand days. And then we don't have to be so vigilant.
So, short, finite and irreplicable childhood has to be a priority. And I'm committed to letting the world know because we know, but we need tools.
And that baby lead winning is, wait, because the book is a tool and you know what it looks for and you can do it. And when your community does it, then it becomes easier.
When you're the only one doing it, it's a nightmare.
It is a nightmare, right?
And I created the pacifiers because pacifiers can help you in those stages and getting the nose to work right. Because the nose that doesn't work right will not take the pacifier baby.
And we published our first article on that.
We're Dr. Calvo and Yantin Spain. And we measured the children that could not hold the device for more than two minutes were positive for in the study it was renegotis. So they had an issue.
So, if a baby cannot hold that suction for two minutes, then you know there's something in the nose and you can take it into the ENT to the pediatrician because poor pediatricians they're very well into.
They weigh the baby, they measure it, the nurse does that, they come in, they're thriving or they're not thriving, they have a fever or not. Next patient.
How are they going to look at stuff like is the nose really working well? I mean, if the patient's had died, the nose is working. Goodbye.
Right, right. They're just trying to survive.
So if you have a parent that's older, not parents that's older, for a parent that has an older child, you know, let's say five and up.
Where do they turn for help? You know, what advice do you have for them if they're looking at this child going mouth breather or ADHD or bed wetter or whatever the signs are they're seeing it.
Well, bed wetting is tremendous because it is so related to mouth breathing. It's just crazy the relationship when you start looking at the physiology of the aldosterone system and the superrenome, you know, hormone stuff and how mouth breathing changes the levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide.
So the lining of the bladder just gets released because of that stuff. And it's completely physiological. It has nothing or usually has nothing to do with the psychological part.
So knowing that mouth breathing is related to bed wetting, it has been a great thing to know. And we can do some things.
And for parents that haven't heard that I'll put the link to Dr. Ben Morales explanation on that because that kind of blew my mind. I was not expecting that connection.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But when you look at the physiology, it's so clear. So for older kids, it just becomes harder and harder.
Sure. The older they are, the hardest and the more at risk the parents are to fall into somebody that can talk about something, but can't necessarily deliver.
It's really sad because we are all talking here about airway, but we can really deliver protocols that are clear, that had a clear beginning, a clear ending in time in money, because patients are, you know, they're spending a lot of money trying to find out what to do.
And these protocols have to be available and any any provider of therapist or doctor or dentist or anybody that propose something has to be prepared to sit down for discussion on, okay, who will look like my child?
How where they're looking when they came to see you? How do they look today? And how long did it take? Maybe not the money component. It's hard to ask how much they paid because every patient is different.
But at least to have an idea is it's going to take a year, it's going to take 10 years. What am I what's my child going to look like? And if they are they still going to need orthodontics and why?
And, you know, the cost can just run up. And I have treated children with thousands of thousands of dollars and all I can tell them in their late teens is your child needs surgery.
After everything you spend after all the nagging after all the relationships in your family were compromised and even marriages fall apart through this and the relationship with children and the parents.
And then I tell you, kid has not improved. Had you done nothing, they would have been better. And think of surgery, which is $100,000. If you do it right. And where are you going to get this money from?
And if you get really going to be open to doing this after everything you've told them since they were little. So it's a loose, loose situation. And I do so many consultations that are there that my heart just sinks for parents that have gone through this loop of going to the traditional
and say, no, I'm going to do better for my child than just going this traditional way. And they try so hard and they span and they read and they educate themselves. And at the end, they're worse off than how they have done anything.
I'm not saying doing anything is appropriate. But I'm saying they're worse off and it's really sad. And I say it with an empathy of somebody that did that. Because I have two kids where I did everything. And he cooperated and he did and he worked.
And then I have one that said, no, I'm not doing this. And she had surgery when she was 16. And then my son that went through everything said, mom, I would have rather come the route of having a carefree childhood.
And when I'm 15, go under the knives in and out. Yes, you have a horrible month. Yes, my mom has to, you know, mortgage her house to pay for the surgery. But my sister is better off than me.
And I have a lot of patients that I'm, you know, guiding through the same.
Because you need an advocate because there's also bad surgical results and that can be incredibly scary.
Yeah, I work with because I know that I will get my perfect result every time from that one. Yeah. And we have a few that we refer to and that, you know, people that have come on our show.
It's the same thing we know because it's such a big deal, right? Just finances, recovering everything.
So as a pioneer in jaw development and airway, what have you learned over the past decade and, you know, what has delivered the best outcome for your patients?
For me, the obviously, I've been talking about the first 1000 days, but once that's gone, then sit back and evaluate things and try to get the environment to be as ideal as possible.
And I think that those working right. I love the go box program. Obviously, it's something that I've brought into the world because I did it with my child and it was amazing. And it's seven minutes a day.
And I think everybody has seven minutes a day for 90 consecutive days.
It's not for everyone because you do need a lot of discipline, but you have a beginning. You have a very clear process and you have an end.
And to that end, you get this result and your brain is rewired and brain plasticity work and go books can be done by anyone because adults can rewire their brain. Everybody can do go.
Wow. Okay.
And we've created a program with Dr. Mercia Santa, so one of the site is and it's all done in the mobile phone.
And there's an email and she follows the process and follows the 90 days with you through the app. So you don't have to go anywhere. It's very affordable because she's in one of the sites.
Every patient that wants to do go picks I sent to her, even though I can do it. My, my partner who's a SLP Catherine called Chico, she can do it.
But for us, it would take more work than if they do it in the app with does it from with kids that are two years old and with elderly that are in the 80s.
So she can.
Oh, wow. It really is everybody. Okay.
And it's a very, very, it just based on posture or posture and you set up the chair ride and you set up your hip right and your feet right and your knees right and then you teach the patient to hold good posture and then you do seven minutes perfect.
And we work on the pause.
So the nose is part of it. We have to pause, make sure the nose is working, slow things down. We do it for 90 days. I brain is required. We might continue it or not. But it's already in our brain.
So if we ever want to have good posture, we know how to get back to there. And it's based on the estri gold clay program posture a problem that I did when I was having.
She has a book called somebody can invite in your podcast. She has a book called eight steps to a paint free back.
So I went through her program and I said, this is fantastic. So I use that knowledge to put together our program. So we've worked on body posture and feet on knees on mouth on nose.
And it's only seven minutes every day.
Right.
So it's very clear because I see so many exercise given to people and do this and do that and where is it. And there's no clear path of like how long, how many, where is the result, what am I going to have at the end.
So I'm a very show it to me first before I do it.
And when somebody cannot show me 10 people that have done what I'm being asked to do. And I can see where they went from where to when I won't do it because I feel okay.
Where am I going and most people's, you know, that talk about airway. They say, well, you have to do these exercises and every day and as many as you can.
And then you come in and they give you another exercise and they say muscle this and work this and choose this. And it's not clear.
Gopics is two things.
Right. Where are you going? Yeah.
It's reading for five minutes and two for two.
I mean, I really want people to be successful.
Yeah.
I did so many mistakes that when I saw gopice, he was like, thank you. And it was I first learned it's from Dr. Wong. He used to call it my exercise program.
And when I saw his page, I said, the I need to do.
And I created the gopice program out of his is we together, you know, created the protocols. We was 30 days first, but then the literature says you really need 90 days repetitive and if you do it at the same time, it's better.
So gopice is a great thing that you could start doing with kids that are two years old.
And I'll put the link for that in our shift.
Yeah, people can check it out.
Yes, it sounds like I'm a, you know, snake oil person with a website with all the stuff that you can buy.
But I've collected stuff that have worked for me. And what didn't exist when I read 2006, the article of Dr. Anglekey, and he could he created the uplocker and he published it and he cured people from snoring.
And I looked at what he did and I said, where's this device.
And I just said, I need to go get it. And he had made it himself.
So we created the device and we packaged it and we made it available, because it wasn't.
And I said, it works. How come the world didn't this works. And it's not my device. It's not my technology. It's not my pattern.
It's not the pacifiers are, but not the uplocker. And I saw that it worked and it was published and he's an ENT, Max of Facial Surgeon and phonoreology, triple Ph.D.
Get us a hospital in Germany. I mean, he had all the credentials and he wasn't online telling people about this. He just published it in the science. He has over 100 articles.
And just did it with his patients. Yeah.
And he said to him, why didn't you tell the world and he says the world doesn't care. They don't care about fixing and curing the world cares about managing symptoms.
That's awesome.
And I'm against people making money. I want to make money. I want everybody to make money.
I want to use my official therapist to use the denominator, which is incredible money maker, if you have my official therapist or you have phonoreologist or speech and language pathologists, speech pathologists.
I can teach them how to make tons of money with our menometer because I'm a number to give you a number. And when you have a number, you have accountability and you can practice meaningfully.
And we have, you know, protocols with four appointments.
So, you know, you're starting where the middle is.
I was going to say, you have a path. Yeah.
And when you have a manometer, you have a path.
And when you know what's going on in the mouth, you can tell someone,
no, your tongue is not a plaster to the room for the month.
Yes, it is. No, it's not.
Look at the number here.
If it was, the number would be negative.
It wouldn't be positive.
If it's positive, it means there's room air inside your mouth.
If there's air, your tongue is not plastered to the room for the month.
And you cannot argue with the number.
But you cannot argue with a patient that swears, I swear.
I read about putting my tongue there.
And then when I go to, I said, what happens when you go to sleep?
You relax.
Even if your mouth is closed, your lips are visibly closed.
If there's air inside your mouth, your tongue is falling down.
And there's no amount of exercise, conscious exercise you can do
to keep your tongue when you relax.
So the only thing that can help you is creating vacuum.
Because when you create vacuum, and I can show you my little
vantos that I use to show the vacuum.
But when you create vacuum, things just stay.
It's a vacuum.
Yeah, by definition.
Yeah.
The suction cup on the window is not pushing.
Right.
You can't push it out.
It's so incredibly strong.
And it's not doing anything actively.
Vacuum is passive.
So we are devises to teach you to hold that vacuum.
And now that we have the pacifiers, you can start teaching a newborn.
Because the newborns know when you're sucking on a pacifier, there's vacuum.
If you can't talk on a pacifier, then your nose might not be working well.
And to be clear, this is not a pacifier that you put in and you say,
here's your binky and you walk away for hours.
This is an active tool that we're going to use for a session a day.
Take it away and then you do it again tomorrow.
Zero to six.
And this is all explained in our website.
There's some videos there.
Zero to six is a screening tool.
You use this to see if your baby is able to keep the pressure for about two minutes.
If he does, he's fine.
Then you give him a regular pacifier, which he also will have eventually.
And they can have that all night.
But this is a screening tool.
If the bubble goes in and now we have one that has a light and we're working on one
that goes to your cell phone.
And one that I, you know, I, I, it plugs into your cartoon so that the child can do that.
So the early one is a screening tool.
Then you have the transition one.
And this one is the one they used to transition.
Still has the, the nipple, but it also has a shield.
And then we go to the next one that only has a shield, which is basically the same
as the uplocker of the adult treatment.
So at 18 months, you take the nipple out.
Because when there's teeth, you don't need to have a nipple pacifiers have been there
for the cave times.
There's evidence we have pacifiers.
It's a good, as long as when the teeth come in, you don't need a nipple anymore.
So you transition to just have the shield that allows you to maintain that suction at rest.
And the one, the one at 18 months, they can wear as much as they want.
I do recommend it's not used on survival.
It has a part that you know, they can pull apart.
It's not bigger than the size that they can choke on, but you don't really want little parts.
But still, yeah.
Yeah.
So again, it's a tool.
It's training them to create that back.
And just like Gopics, if they wear that device for an hour a day when they're watching TV
and they're keeping suction during that time or listening to an audiobook.
We used to do the family treehouse.
The magic treehouse. Magic treehouse. Oh, yes.
My kids loved it.
So when, you know, okay, let's listen to half an hour of this, but the bubble has to be in.
And you're very straight and not letting them use it without the right protocol.
And if they do that an hour a day, it becomes second nature.
You'll never have to worry about it.
And the tongue will be up there expanding the roof of the mouth.
So all the teeth can feed, including the wisdom teeth that gives room.
So your airways large and you never have to deal with snoring or sleep apnea or all the side effects that comes from your breathing.
Not being right.
Which would be amazing.
So at the end of every.
At 18 months.
Yep.
And now I've got links for all this, but all that in the show notes, as well as the books that we've talked about.
So at the end of every episode, I always turn it back.
To you, the, the gas, because you know, y'all are the experts.
Or a final thought to leave with our parent audience.
Well, final thoughts are difficult because parents are in a transition right now.
But they have to support each other.
Get together, do groups where you're doing the right thing.
Talk about your successes.
Talk about your failures.
Some providers are great.
They're super nice people, but they're not doing the right thing.
Even though they might be telling you the right thing, they might not have the results.
And be brave because saying this doctor, he's a nice person.
I love him.
He cleans our kids teeth.
He's fantastic.
But the airway part didn't work for us and telling your community and finding the ones and supporting the ones that are not doing the right thing.
And supporting the ones that do.
The other thing which is super critical is don't drive yourself nuts over this.
Oh, yeah.
There's a lot of stress because you didn't do the right thing and you feel like a bad parent.
Don't don't go that route.
You're a good parent and things are changing.
We're in a time of transition shows like yours are fantastic because they're really going depth.
And there is a lot of good information out there, but you have to figure out which is good and which is not.
And you have the common sense to find it.
And I mean, I'm committed with my books to give out information so people can take this under their arm.
Our upcoming book knows is doing that it has a lot of solutions.
And go picks is a great solution that you can do on your own or pacifiers or off lockers.
There are things you can do. Mewan can help if you have certain issues getting the muscles, but going back to nature and thinking how we used to live up to 300,000 years where we're living in Cape Town.
I'm not saying we should go back there.
Right.
But you should take what was good then and compliment and bring it forward as of the past and we go to a much better future.
I think that would be perfect. Right.
That would be ideal. Thank you so, so much for coming on today and for everything that you shared and for being a pioneer and really just orging a path and putting this out there for all of us.
Thank you so much.
Super committed. So I'm happy to come back whenever you invite me.
Thank you.
Thanks again to today's guest, Dr. Sandra Kong for sharing her medical expertise and each of you for listening to today's episode.
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