Hi everybody, and welcome back to Airway First, a podcast from the Children's Airway
First Foundation.
I'm your host, Rebecca Downing.
My guest today is Dr. Tasha Terzoh.
Dr. Terzoh graduated from Western University in 1994, where she received a postgraduate
osteopathic manual medicine anatomy fellowship.
She completed her internship at UCSF Family Medicine Residency at the Santa Rosa Community
Hospital.
Since 1995, she has been practicing osteopathy, homeopathy, functional medicine, prolotherapy,
and PRP, specializing in cranial functional dysfunctions.
She's a clinical adjunct assistant professor at the Turro College of Osteopathic Medicine,
where she has been a guest lecturer since 2007.
She's a founding member of the ALF Educational Institute and is an internationally recognized
expert in the application of osteopathy and functional dentistry, with a focus on the
use of advanced, light-wear functional devices and TMD.
She is the author of the ALF approach, Changing the Face of Orthodontics.
You can find out more about Dr. Terzoh at www.drtashaterzoh.com.
And now, here's my interview with Dr. Terzoh.
All right, thank you, Dr. Terzoh, and welcome to our podcast.
It's great to have you.
Thank you.
It's great to be here.
I'm excited to be able to share.
Yeah, absolutely.
So before we begin, just to kind of set the stage for everybody, what exactly is a DO
and what is the practice of osteopathy?
It's a great question.
And I can start by talking about what is an orthopedic position in America, because it's
different in America than in the rest of the world, actually.
Really?
Okay.
Yes, yes.
So we have different licensing capacities, basically, or regulations in America than
we do in the rest of the world.
So in the United States, there's two different ways to become a medical physician.
There's two different organizations that regulate a medical license in the United States.
One is the AMA, American Medical Association, and the other one is the AOA, American Osteopathic
Association.
And depending upon, and each one of those have different schools.
So you have the allopathic, which is an MD, medical school, which is four years, and you
have the osteopathic medical school, which is also four years.
So when you apply to medical school, you choose to apply to, you can choose to apply to both,
and many do both.
I was captivated by the osteopathic philosophy, and I was very clear I wanted to be an osteopath,
and I chose not to apply to any MD schools.
The osteopathic philosophy, there's a philosophy behind how we practice medicine.
My beloved husband's an MD, and we have a conversation often about this.
There is no philosophy in allopathic medicine.
It's basically kill all germs at all costs and avoid death.
That's basically what they're, you know, that's basically what underneath what they're trying
to do is that in the osteopathic philosophy, we have some basic, basic principles.
And that is that the body has the inherent capacity to heal itself.
So we may put a bandaid on, but we're not healing the patient.
We're creating an environment for the patient to heal itself.
So it's really coming from a different perspective.
So I do a lot of functional medicine also, and I come from the osteopathic functional
medicine perspective, which is how do I help this person help themselves?
Where are the obstacles of health?
What is limiting this person from optimizing their own health?
And then a basic principle is that the body is a functional unit.
So the body is one unit from the top of our heads to the bottom of our toes.
There is no division and there is no effect in one part of the body.
It doesn't have an effect in another part of the body.
So if we have, and this really comes into play when we're talking about orthodontics,
if we put braces on teeth and we move teeth, the whole head shifts, the base of the cranium
shifts, the cervical shift, posture shifts, everything shifts to accommodate those teeth
coming together.
And that's why it's crucially important to be able to have collaboration and to be able
to work together and to make sure that when those pearly whites are coming back together,
everything else is in alignment.
Or else what do we do?
We lock in a strain pattern.
So coming back to the osteopathic principles, the body's a functional unit from the head
to toe and structure function of reciprocally interrelated, which means that a bridge is
created in a certain structure to have a certain function, right?
Just like our human body has a structure that has a function to it.
So our structures function.
That's really important.
So we're coming from a more mechanical perspective of looking at the human body, meaning that
if we have ribs that are not moving well and are restricted, if we get a pneumonia, most
likely the pneumonia is going to go to the side where the ribs aren't moving really well.
Oh, got it.
So looking at the human body is not only a functional unit from head to toe, but that
everything in the body has motion and motion is held.
And this expansion contraction that happens of the breath, let's say, in the body, that
is also the driving force for arterial blood supply going to a cell and venous and lymphatic
return going away.
So I'm giving you kind of bullet points and trying to build a big picture of what the
philosophy is of osteopathy because that is a basic difference.
The education is basically exactly the same as an MD, except for we have about 100 to
500 hours, depending upon what school you go to, what aspect of school you go to, where
we learn this philosophy and we also learn how to diagnose neuromuscular skeletal issues.
So we come out of this in addition, that 500 is in addition.
Exactly.
So we have more class hours per se.
And what happens with the MDs is they get out earlier and go to clinics and start doing
more of their clinical rotations or clinical education earlier, a little earlier.
Each school is very different.
So we know how to work up back pain.
When we graduate with our four years, we know how to work up a back pain or a headache or
an ankle strain.
And we learn nine different ways of treating neuromuscular skeletal issues.
But it's just like taking a basic course in cardiology.
It's not enough to go into practice, but it's at least a something.
And then once we finish our four years, then we intermesh together in our residency program.
So like I did one year of a family practice residency with UCSF, which were almost all
MDs.
There was like one other DO.
In all residency programs, you'll find DOs and MDs in the same residency program.
I would say then you get licensed by your state and our licenses exactly the same.
So if I had specialized in surgery, I would be doing surgery at the DO, but I didn't.
I chose to spend that it gets complicated.
I'm so sorry about this.
It gets complicated.
Then 95% of my colleagues that are DOs don't practice the way I practice.
So I practice as a traditional osteopath.
In other words, I use my hands with every single patient to help them in terms of removing
obstacles of health and helping their health optimize, basically.
And I also did a four year training in TOT and the world of homeopathy.
I do PRP and pro-lo therapy injections.
So I do cellular regeneration.
Do a lot of the injections in the jaw joints because I work a lot with TMD.
I see a lot of babies.
I see children.
So it's kind of like a family practice old fashioned in a way because I'm using primarily,
I start with my hands to see what are restrictions in the body and what we can do to remove those.
And in the rest of the world, the osteopaths are not medical physicians.
So in Canada and Australia, New Zealand, France, they're more like chiropractors.
So they learn how to do, they learn osteopathy, they learn the orthopedic portion and how
to do the hands on and they learn how to use the nine different modalities that are taught,
but they're not medical physicians.
So they can't do injections or they can't prescribe medication.
They can't do anything that's in the world of a physician's world.
Interesting.
Yeah.
Very interesting.
So let's say your hands on and you touched on a little bit about modality.
It's more how the body, if I were to come in and let's say I have, I know I'm having
my annual sinus infection.
So let's just start with something like that.
When your hands on, how do you move and see, you're looking not just to treat, hi, I have
a sinus infection, you're looking deeper is my understanding.
For sure.
So inherent within principles of osteopathy is digging for etiology.
And that's one thing that's very, that I think from my perspective is quite unique to osteopathy.
So I'm trying to, if you came in to see me with sinus infection, which definitely is something
right up my alley, I feel very comfortable with.
I felt many, many people with chronic allergies and get them off the antibiotics.
I'm going to be thinking, what's going on?
Where's their lack of motion?
Why is there lack of motion in the mid face?
What's going on where we're not getting mid face movement and what's not happening that
needs to drain your sinuses.
So draining sinuses, draining the middle ears is an inherent capacity within a human body
and a lot of it has to do with the tongue and getting the tongue up and back and getting
the pressure change that happens to the mid face when we have a functional swallow and
a tongue resting position and a good dental occlusion.
So if that, that's one of the things I'm going to look at, so I'm going to take a good history.
I usually spend, I spend two hours with the patient initially.
And that's when I'm going through absolutely everything from your birth history to your
developmental history, to your nursing sucking swallow history, to your trauma history, what
sort of head injuries did you have?
Did you have any, you know, babies fall all the time off beds, countertops?
I go through that.
And I look at your orthodontic history, you know, what else happened?
You know, are your teeth actually in a physiological position or a non-physiological position because
they were forced there and the rest of your body wasn't able to, and your rest of your
body is now accommodating for this new dental occlusion that's man made, that's based on
classes like class one, two and three, which are lining up basically the pre, the first
molar, but that's not a functional dental occlusion.
A functional dental occlusion is when that dental occlusion is biocompatible with the
rest of the body.
Gotcha.
Then I'm also going to be looking at your diet and your gut.
So if I notice that I'm spending an hour and a half with the patient and they've got a
great lip seal and they're breathing through their nose, now I'm like, hmm, why is it congested?
Maybe it's from the gut and maybe this person has a food allergy.
So I do work up of the gut and I look at maybe it's dairy, which a lot of times it is, or
maybe it's wheat.
And so then I'll see like, how open is this person to changing their diet?
That's very challenging for some people.
So it's a very individuated approach.
The non-invigilated approach is give you antibiotics and just keep giving you antibiotics and like,
well, this is your- Every year, come back in again.
This is your core genetics.
This is the way it is.
And I'm just going to keep giving you antibiotics and this is like a five minute appointment.
No, no, thank you.
Not going to do that.
I want to find out why this person is having this chronic recurrence sinus infection.
Something's not right.
Okay.
All right.
And you touched on this briefly, which they can't see.
I was smiling when you did it.
But when you were talking about the occlusions and the man-made occlusions and when I heard
you speak at AAPMD, which I will put the link to that lecture in our show notes, one of
the things you talked about was the impact of retractive orthodontics.
And in kind of the approach specifically around airways.
That's one thing here at Children's Airway First that we have seen and we're seeing over
and over with people that we speak with, with other medical professionals.
How do you approach, well, just there's really no good way to ask that.
I mean, how do you approach that?
You have a patient that's coming in that you know they're having issues and here they are.
They're getting ready to either have orthodontic work done in their teen years or now you're
in your 30s or 40s and you had that work done.
And now you're presenting with chronic allergies, sleep apnea, things of that nature.
Yeah.
Well, it begins with early intervention.
So I'm all hyped up about children.
I have children myself, actually they're now young adults or they're trying to be young
adults, we'll put it that way.
Anyhow, I'm very passionate about children and if you know, if I could probably retire
now and feel fulfilled because I know I've helped so many children.
It's about and now it's all about education.
It's educating parents, educating my colleagues, educating the dental world, the malfunction
world about what are the signs that we see right when a baby's born that is going to
tell us that this one is going to have an airway issue.
So the airway issue typically comes before the teeth comes in.
So the teeth come in, the teeth are coming in after the second swallow are already in
place and the second swallow have more to do with increasing oral volume than our teeth
do.
Our teeth are simply coming together so we can now have a couple of things we can chew
and the chewing and the function of chewing and how we're chewing very much dictates the
growth of the mandible.
So this is the epigenetics.
This is how we use our function, how the functions in our face work is what develops a face.
So learning how, yes, go ahead.
Oh, I'm sorry.
So the airway issue most of the time is there at birth or is it just the signs of dysfunction
that lead to airway.
It's like a dysfunction.
Yes.
Okay.
So it's a dysfunctional side right at birth and it really has to do with how they nurse
the second swallow of nursing and it has to do with can they nurse on both sides?
Can they actually have the range of motion to turn their neck?
If they don't, that's a subtle torticollis.
So the birth experience is one of our biggest formative experiences that we have in our
life that shape and form our head and our face because our head is what's opening up
the cervix.
So the whole entire how the baby's positioned, the kind of forces that are happening, the
intervention that's happening from below up, let's say, have a huge effect on the functioning
of our face and our head and our neck.
So that's one thing that's being completely missed is taking a really good part of history.
The other thing is taking a really good trauma history.
So there's portions of the cranium that don't ossify until we're eight to nine years old.
So any falls on the back of the head can twist and compress different cranial bones in pinching
on certain cranial nerves, creating entrapment.
And this makes these nerves not function as well.
And these nerves are cranial nerves, nine, 10, 11 and 12.
So four of these very important nerves that they all go to the head, face, mouth can be
pinched and compromised with facial strains.
So the hands on, if in my ideal utopia, every single newborn would have an osteopathic treatment
from someone who specializes in cranial osteopathy, everything.
And if I can get them early enough, because I will go to the delivery room with my mamas
that I treat when they're pregnant.
I was about to say at birth.
At birth, at birth.
But you know, bring them to me a week later, I'm still happy.
But those are ones, if I follow them all the way through, they don't need orthodontia.
Because what we're doing is integrating the functions.
So it's the functions that get, that go in the wrong direction, that create a structure
that then is holding a maladaptive airway.
So airway is simply a structure.
I usually have a toilet paper roll with me, but it's a toilet paper roll.
If you imagine a hole, a toilet paper roll, right?
And you put that in the back of your tongue.
That's your airway.
Airway is collapsible soft tissue all the way around.
So is the function of those nerves to give the soft tissue tone to be able to increase
the size of our airway?
So it's not about pulling the face forward.
It's not about rapid pallid expanders, which only do two dimensional, not three dimensional
expansion anyhow.
It's about looking in the beginning at the functioning of these nerves to make sure that
they're intact.
The action that expresses the intactness of these four cranial nerves is nursing.
So if we're having to hold our baby over our shoulders, or can only nurse in bed on the
right side, but not the left side, can only nurse laying down, these are all signs of
compensations for lack of tone and integration of these nerves and or a tongue tie.
But not all tongue, not all nursing dysfunctions or nursing issues are tongue ties by any means.
A lot of times is low tone to the hypergloctal nerve, which is a nerve that innervates the
tongue.
So can this be seen if you're not breastfeeding?
Can you still spot it if the child is not breastfeeding?
Yes, you can assess the suck.
So even if you're a little pinky in their mouth, I mean, if moms are doing it's hard
unless you've had other children to compare it to.
Okay.
So if they're breastfeeding, what's a good sex swallow?
But if they have a low sex swallow and a low tone, then this is something that's worth
looking at to see if it is a compression to the base of the cranial, which can quite easily
be resolved.
But if it's not resolved, the ongoing consequence leads to sleep apnea.
Got it.
Without a question.
Amazing.
Okay.
Wow.
So the other thing that I heard you talk about was about the food we eat.
Yes.
And I'm now, you know, when I heard you do it, I have to be honest, I started retracing
my steps, you know, what did I feed my children growing up?
If I set them up to win, oh my goodness.
But you had mentioned that it actually impacts facial development or growth.
100%.
Yes.
How so?
Yes.
So first of all, us moms, it's always our fault.
We're always like, you know, we've got this radar looking for where did we go wrong?
Right.
The guilt one.
Of course.
Oh my gosh.
Oh, God bless us all.
Anyhow.
Yes.
So what we eat forms our face.
And the reason why is because it's not only nutrition in terms of the nutrient dense
food that we need to build healthy bones and healthy muscles.
But it is what we chew has an influence on how we chew.
So if we're feeding our babies, all these soft foods, you know, the ones that are in
the packages where you just like you're driving and you've got the kids in the back and you
just hand them the package and they squeeze it.
The little applesauce.
The little applesauces.
Right.
So those are all soft foods.
So part of what's happened, if we look at evolution of or the change of human faces
over time is that we have become more maxillary mandibular, which means that we're back.
We're becoming more like bulldogs.
We're getting a flatter face.
And the reason for that is because of we're not chewing on bones anymore.
You know, we used to chew on bones for like six hours a day or something like that.
Like there was a lot of chewing.
We'd have meat that we'd have to work.
Nuts.
This sort of thing.
We didn't have smoothies.
We didn't have juicing.
You know, we didn't have applesauce.
So it's all these soft foods that are creating the experience where we're not using our jaw
as much.
And so there's many, many studies done on mice rats.
One of them, what they did was they took out the occlusion on one side.
They took out how the bicuspid and the first molar contact on one side of the mouse or
mice or rat, whatever, little poor rodents.
And then they looked at mandibular development.
And what they saw was that they had mandibular growth on the side where there was an occlusion.
But on the side, there wasn't an occlusion.
The mandible didn't grow.
So what it shows us is that with the amount of contact that happens is the contact and
the compression that happens and stimulates bone growth.
Simulates the mandible to grow.
So when I see the kids that are retrokinathic, right?
First of all, if I see a baby that's retrokinathic, I know right away that mom has an airway issue.
So what happened was mom had a...
Mom has an airway issue.
Mom, that's one of the main reasons why we're seeing all these babies with retrokinathia,
which means that the mandible is back.
So what happens is that mom has an airway issue and therefore the womb is a suboptimal
oxygenated environment.
And our environment is what dictates our growth patterns, right?
Just like I'm talking about the epigenetics of what we eat creates a mandible.
The same thing, the epigenetics happens in utero.
So if mom has four bicuspid extraction, they've had braces, everything is pulled back, right?
The tongue doesn't have room.
So the tongue is going to go back because the poor little tongue doesn't know where else
to go.
We have suboptimal oxygenation happening as we're developing our babies.
And so the face of the baby is an expression of the environment it's been in.
Wow.
That's a pretty big one for me.
I just have to kind of let that one sit for a moment.
Yes.
Yes, I understand that.
Wow.
You're listening to Airway First with today's guest, Dr. Tasha Terzo.
You can find out more about the Children's Airway First Foundation and our mission to
ensure that every child has access to screening, evaluation, and treatment of all children's
airway disorders before the age of six on our website at childrensairwayfirst.org.
You can also find a ton of great resources for parents on our website, including videos,
blogs, recommended books, comprehensive medical research, and more.
As a reminder, this podcast and the opinions expressed here are not a medical diagnosis.
If you suspect your child might have an airway issue, contact your pediatric airway dentist
or pediatrician.
And now, back to my interview with Dr. Tasha Terzo.
It's coming from a whole perspective and it's coming from a functional perspective.
So, so much of our perspectives within dentistry is all structural.
And we think of dentists as fixing cavities and making teeth align.
So what this perspective is, is now we're going to look at, well, what brings teeth
into their position in the first place?
And it's not genetics.
That is for sure.
It is not genetics.
It's not like when we have our kid that has not room for their teeth that we need to pull
the teeth out because just so sorry, genetically, you know, your mom and your dad or, you know,
whatever whoever made you weren't compatible to create an oral volume that's conducive
to life.
So that is not true.
What happens is, is it's the initial functions that don't go optimally, that create a suboptimal
structure.
So our faces and the structure of our face tell a picture of how we functioned with our
nasal breathing, our lip seal, our tongue up posturing and our chewing.
Those are the main components that grow a face.
So this is coming from the point of view of early intervention is intervention on looking
at the functions and trying to get those online so that we can develop a face that is perfect
for us.
It's a perfect expression of our optimal health.
And how early we can start is birth.
How late can we make an impact with this approach?
We're actually talking.
We can do now prebirth because now we can look at the moms and I can be like, you know
what?
How about if we do something to optimize your oxygen before you get pregnant?
Right?
Wow.
Right?
I mean, prenatals are nothing.
Right.
So prenatals are nothing compared to like optimizing oxygenation.
I mean, I see my beans, we grow to oxygen just like a plant grows to sunshine.
So we're going to contort and even in our structure as we're growing, you know, we're
going to tongue thrust or we're going to lateral thrust with our tongue or we're going to open
mouth, breathe, we're going to do whatever we can to optimize that function in our body.
And it's never too late to heal for not dead.
We're still transforming.
That's my opinion.
So I love that.
I love that.
Now this approach we're talking about, this is the ALF approach.
Correct?
Mm-hmm.
Well, the ALF approach includes working collaboratively with an osteoporotic physician, someone doing
hands-on, a myofunctional therapist and a dentist who's trained in how to adjust the
alphapoints, how to make the alphapoints and how to adjust it.
So it's very much of a collaborative approach, which I love because I think that, no, I think
my experience is that we can serve our patients that much better when we work together.
I understand that.
Yeah, absolutely.
And that's one of the things that we're at Children's Airway First rallying for is this
collaboration.
I mean, we are much stronger together and that includes everything from myofunctional therapy,
you know, DOs, MDs, dentists, everybody coming together.
So with, you know, looking at that, that collaborative approach, which would be at that point treating
the patient, the entire patient, you know, it stands in the way of obtaining the information
that is needed to treat the whole patient instead of this kind of siloed reactive approach,
which is where at least American medicine is right now.
Well, it's a paradigm shift.
It's really a paradigm shift, you know, if the MD is fulcrum within the germ theory
and the, you know, we're going to do medications, we're not going to dig for answers, we're
not going to question, we're not going to be curious.
And I mean, DOs can absolutely be like this too.
I in no way mean to put it all on MDs in any way.
Again, my beloved husband's an MD, so it's not about that.
It's about that kind of approach, right?
So curiosity, I think that actually curious, I think there's some things, one is curiosity.
I think most health professions are not moving with curiosity.
And to be curious, one has to take their ego and throw it out the window because you have
to be, you can't be ego forward and I call it ego forward.
And that's just really not pleasant to work with, especially in a collaborative way.
So everyone has to take their ego and kind of put it aside, you know, eat some humble
pie, recognize that gosh, maybe I'm missing something.
So that takes curiosity.
Curiosity means an open mind.
You know, Einstein was very, very curious.
He was a curious human being.
Right.
Open minded.
Mr. Foller was open minded.
You know, that's where we can then integrate a new paradigm is when we are open minded,
curious, questioning.
And in order to do that, one has to have open eyes to look and see the problem in the first
place.
You know, there's a lot of people that are just missing that there's an epidemic of
airway issues now, right?
And then there's a question of what to do about the airway issue.
You know, if you have the concept that the body is hard and rigid, because all of our
anatomy that we're taught comes from dead people and they're hard and rigid and they
don't move.
But right, that's actually not the living real experience of a human body.
You can look at it from what, what a body looks like in surgery.
I mean, you know, I was fascinated with the human body and I drove from LA to San Diego
every day for a month to do autopsies all day long.
And a lot of those autopsies were on children and I was able to look at the inside of the
calvarium, look at the dura membranes and how they, how they actually feel and look
at the brain and look at the connection between the head and the cervicals.
That was curious.
And what I saw was, I mean, the human body that is basically alive or recently dead
is very different than the anatomical perspective that we're having that the body's hard and
rigid.
So if you have that perspective that the body's hard and rigid and is compartmentalized, then
you can put in something that's hard and rigid and fixed in the upper palate and push the
face forward.
But if you come from the perspective that the body is a whole functioning unit, that
everything, anything that happens to the head is going to have consequences all the way
down the body.
All the way down, then if you put something hard, fixed and rigid in the body, it's actually
not biocompatible.
It's not biologically compatible with life because living tissue isn't hard, fixed and
rigid.
It's more of a biotensegrity.
So this is where Buckminster Fuller gave us this phenomenal principle of tensegrity.
The body has this capacity to have a bio biotensegrity, which means that all the pieces have to be
moving and the movement of each of the pieces creates the stability in the body.
So stability is created by the capacity for all the parts to move.
So if you put something hard, fixed and rigid, whether it's a hard plate in the ankle or
in the hip, the rest of the body is going to have to compensate, which is fine.
Sometimes that's what we have to do.
We need hip replacements sometimes.
But to know that there's compensations for it and to then be able to assess what are
the compensations and to treat the compensations to optimize health.
Makes sense.
Now, on the curiosity that you mentioned, which I have to say personally, I do agree
with.
Does that also require though the curiosity aspect of it more time?
You can't be this curious in five minutes seeing a patient.
You mentioned earlier, you spend two hours with patients.
I spent two hours with the initial consult.
With the initialer.
And my follow-ups are half an hour, which is still much longer than physicians are charging
basically.
So it does put me outside the box.
And one of the consequences of that is that I don't bill insurance directly.
So it's all fee for service.
And that has a consequence.
And I have to deal with that consequence in different ways that I have to deal with it.
So that was something I had to come to peace with when I was 26 years old and starting
my practice.
That I knew that how the gift that I had to provide wasn't going to be in the box.
And there was going to be a consequence to that.
One of the ways I feel like I can make up for it is teaching.
Spreading the word and talking about what other options are.
And yes, you have to also like, for example, we just had an orthodontist go through one
of the courses that I teach at.
And she sees 90 patients a day and she couldn't fit the ALF approach into her practice at 90
patients a day because it takes more time.
The ALF, the ALF, which is a light wire that goes behind the upper and lower teeth is every
month you go in, you see the ALF dentist, they take it out and they have to problem
solve exactly where to activate, where to activate the wire for that individual.
So there's no cookie cutter.
And so when you take cookie cutter, all the other ways, the palate expanders, bio block,
orthotropics, DNA, homeoblock, all these things are turned screws.
It doesn't take much intelligence to turn a screw, right?
Doing the ALF approach takes time and it takes education.
So this is another issue that's happening is dentists are advertising saying that they
do the ALF and it's really a catch and a bait and switch, I think it's called bait and switch,
which they want people to come in because they want more business, but they really don't
know how to do the ALF.
They haven't taken a course in how to do the ALF.
And then they say, oh, the ALF won't help with that, but the bio block will or orthotropics
will or this will help or the rapid palate expander would be a better way for you.
So one of the main questions we've been talking to parents is that if you go see someone who's
advertising that they're doing the ALF is ask them what courses they've taken.
And right now, you know, the course that I can recommend wholeheartedly is the course
with Dr. Dr. Bronson called the AEI, ALF Educational Institute.
And that's something that I teach with.
So I help teach those courses to dentists.
So maybe that's a great limiting step is for dentists to realize that if they're wanting
to do this approach, they need to invest time and resources to get trained and do it the
right way.
Absolutely.
Yeah, absolutely.
I think it basically comes down to money, money and ego, I would say, right?
It's mean it would be like, well, I may not make as much money with this, but I'm at least
doing no harm and I'm helping people.
The ego part, you have to throw it away if you want to be curious.
Right, agreed.
Absolutely.
Great.
So thinking about medical professionals, kind of shifting gears a little bit instead
of parents from this perspective, what kind of questions should they be asking?
Are there questions they could ask to help identify some of these suboptimal airways
and children earlier?
So really good question.
The question that we have to start with is who are they talking to?
Are they talking to the dentists?
They're talking to the pediatrician.
They're talking to the osteopath or the malfunctional therapist or the lactation consultant.
So the answer, and then it was going to depend on if any of them have any education in this
world of growth and development.
It's basically facial growth and development of children.
Facial growth.
Right.
So it is a consequence of the functioning of the face.
So once again, we want to dig underneath.
Again, imagine the toilet paper roll.
It is literally a collapsible space behind the tongue.
So we have to think of everything that affects that area of the body.
I have an on-demand course that's open for parents.
Certainly parents.
It's an on-demand course.
It's 11 hours of me talking.
And I go, one of the lectures is called Airway and Beyond.
And what I do is I take the airway, structure of the airway and expand it into the function
in the human body, which is really comes down to breath and breathing.
So breathing is a function that ends second swallow chewing that creates an airway.
So we want to again look at what are the functions.
But to circle back around with your question, unfortunately, it's not a good, I don't have
a good answer for it.
I think it's better for parents to be educated.
That's what I really encourage.
There's these podcasts.
You can take my online class.
Read the book.
Read my book.
All you have to do is read the book.
And then the parents are going to be educated on what to look for in their children.
And that way we're directly advocating for our kids.
Got it.
And by the way, I will put a link to both your book and the course, the on-demand course.
And I'll show notes for parents.
So just a couple more questions when we're looking at this multidisciplinary approach
to medicine, specifically around pediatrics.
What does that look like to you?
What is your kind of utopia?
What is the right way to do it?
What would be the end all be all for you?
So the form of it is what I actually have in my office, which pre-COVID I had in my
functional therapist coming to my office every two weeks.
Now she does everything on Zoom, but we're very collaborative in good communication.
I have an alph-pediatric dentist in my office.
And I have an osteopathic colleague in my office because I'm quite full.
So I get to refer to someone who's been educated in all of this.
That's kind of my utopia.
I'm quite happy in that.
And that can be created in other places in the world also.
So it's the connection with the osteopath who's trained in this.
So it's very important for me to be clear.
Many of my colleagues do not know about this.
They don't understand the connection between the dental occlusion and the cranium.
They don't understand, they don't even know how to assess tongue function.
So that's what I'm very much passionately trying to do.
I'm teaching so much and I'm trying to get my colleagues to join in this to really be
able to stay on the cutting edge and to be able to give this service.
It's not, certainly back around to what does it look like.
It's not essential.
Like it doesn't have to be that the alph-dentist is in the same office as the cranium osteopath
or the malfunctional therapist.
What's most important is that we have good communication and collaboration skills, which
is sometimes personality-inducted.
So that's connected working together.
So they can be personality limited.
If it's just someone on the team that you, for whatever reason, you move in life differently
than they move in life and you don't feel like you can work together, even though you're
both competent in what you do, it's going to be a more challenging.
So sure.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
So, Joy, what would you recommend to a parent that has a child that has a sleep issue or
is sure that their child has some kind of airway issue, whether or not they're at the
stage of, okay, now it's very sense time.
How would you guide these parents?
What would your recommendation be?
I wish I had a quick and simple one for that one, but it would depend upon the age of the
child.
Do they have teeth or not?
How old are they?
That gives me, do we have an option for an owl or not?
Am I dealing with a one-year-old or a six-month-old?
So then I'm going to really look at their history, their birth history.
I'm going to get my hands on them and I'm going to see how the structure is moving, how
is the face of the cranium moving?
Is there a good motion?
I'm going to assess their interoral suck and swallow and look at that, look at their friend,
if they have a friend limit, something like that.
And then start working with the granite either like, see someone to release a tongue, if
that's really the issue.
I work a lot with lasers.
I love photobiomodulation.
I think it's the absolutely cutting edge of medicine.
I have a laser in my office where we use it underneath the tongue and it can elongate
the fibers.
So if some baby is kind of like maybe tongue tied, maybe not tongue tied, we treat them
osteopathically and then we use the laser to not just elongate the fibers underneath
the tongue, but also to stimulate the neural integration of a suck and swallow.
So we do points on the face.
It's almost like you could think of it as neural reflexive integration, but with laser
and it's phenomenal.
So those are some of the, what I look at in treating human beings that don't have teeth.
It's interesting, just this morning I got an email from a family in Kauai that's reaching
out that exactly has this.
They have a five year old, they haven't slept in three years, he has an airway issue and
they're like, what do we do?
So the first thing I have to do is I've got to get online and assess the situation and
try to figure out what's going on with this specific human being.
So finding someone who can help with finding out exactly what the problem is, where's the
obstacle?
That's what we're trying to find.
Where is the obstacle?
And then I try to connect them with, this one will go probably to an alfdentist because
he's five and if he's compliant enough, we can do two, three year olds.
Yeah.
Awesome.
So typically at the end of a podcast, I like to provide our guests an opportunity just to
speak to parents and leave them with whatever you think is appropriate.
So I'd like to offer you that time.
Oh gosh, that makes me almost want to cry.
Ugh, the first thing that comes up is that I'm just so sorry.
You know, it's just so challenging and so difficult to be a parent these days.
You know, 26 years ago when I was first in practice, the kids, you know, it would be
rare for me to see a kid with X-men allergies and asthma and a breathing disorder.
You know, we didn't see that.
It's only 20, I've only been in practice 26 years and now every single one of my kids,
I would say has a gut issue to some extent.
They all have information and gut issues.
So I'm all my kiddos I'm treating for gut issues.
So I think I just have to say, hang in there.
Whenever there's a problem, there's a solution, you know, for glycoposphate, crazy stuff that's
happening.
It's like there's a solution to that, you know.
We just have to keep our eyes open and be curious and our ears open and be determined
to figure out how to give our children the best care possible and to stay fulcrummed
and function.
Right?
Don't, it's easy to get overwhelmed.
It's easy to feel like.
Sure.
Yeah.
Just give me the magic pill.
Give me the magic thing and make my kid either sleep or make this go away.
Sometimes that happens, but don't compromise.
Don't compromise for a quick fix necessarily that doesn't, isn't long term health giving.
I would say.
Put in that category things that are hard and fixed and in the mouth.
Got it.
I cannot thank you enough for coming on here and sharing everything.
It was absolutely educational and very enlightening.
So thank you so much.
You're so welcome.
I really appreciate the opportunity and, you know, may all children be able to find their
health.
Thanks again to today's guest, Dr. Tasha Tersot for sharing her medical insight and to each
of you for listening to today's episode.
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Take care, stay safe and happy breathing, everyone.