Hi everybody and welcome back to Airway First, the podcast from the Children's Airway First
Foundation. I'm your host Rebecca Downing. As we say goodbye to 2022 and look forward
to the year ahead, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on some of the amazing guests we've had
on the program over the past year. In this episode, part one of our year in review, you'll hear excerpts
from various podcast episodes based on topics such as airway health education, personal stories,
healing, airway in the face, and speech and myofunctional therapy. Personally, I don't really
are time pulling this episode together as it was really hard for me to narrow down the perfect
excerpt from each episode because every guest brought so much amazing information and insight
to the podcast. I'll include links to every episode in the show notes so that if there's
something in the excerpt that you hear that resonates with you, you'll be able to access
the full episode with just a click. So if you're ready, let's jump into part one of our 2020
year in review. In this first segment, we're going to focus on education. So our journey with
our podcast began with the question of why are so many of us sick compared to our ancestors?
The answer to that question is the driving force behind this airway movement that the
children's airway first is part of. In this first segment, we'll hear from award-winning
journalist and author James Nestor and dental leader, professor, speaker Dr. Kevin Boyd.
Let's listen to a couple of segments from their episode as James and Kevin laid the
educational groundwork for the airway journey. We all know how to breathe, right? We've been
doing it since birth. So why do I need to learn how to breathe? Well, you could say that same
thing about eating or exercising, right? Right? So if we evolved or grew up in a natural environment,
you don't need to learn how to breathe. You don't need to learn how to exercise. You don't need to
learn what foods to eat and when you don't need to relearn how to sleep. But since we aren't in
that environment anymore, since we're in an industrial environment, we need to relearn
all of these things, how our bodies are naturally supposed to be. And so I'm not going to go move
to a cave or to the wilderness. I want to live in this environment. And if you're going to live in
this environment and not be sick all the time, you need to listen to your body. And it's not
just that you need to relearn to breathe, but you need to relearn to do all of these different
things. And breathing is just a part of that. So we have lost the ability to breathe properly.
Just look at the data and you'll see that. I was shocked when I first found that, but it's
but it's entirely true. Yeah. And we've talked about this in some other podcasts episodes, which
you know, obviously I'll link to, but and you really hit on it. It's the industrial environment.
I mean, that's where this shift happened, isn't it? Yeah. And all you have to do is either look at
our ancestors, distant ancestors, or look at indigital populations that are still living in
the way that our ancestors did thousands of years ago. And they don't have hypertension,
they don't have diabetes, they don't have breathing problems, they don't have respiratory issues. So
you know, they don't have lower back pain or foot problems. So all of the, I won't say all,
many of the problems most of us living in the industrial world are containing with are
our problems of our own creation. So if we have created these problems, these health issues for
ourselves, then we can help reduce them or get rid of them. And that's exactly what's happening
in self care and health awareness right now all over the world. At the core, if it's my understanding,
is this whole disevolution that you were referencing, right? The jaws that you know,
that we just suddenly don't have room in our mouths anymore. Well, there's many reasons why
we're such poor breathers. And this disevolution is one of many reasons. I think it's the primary
driver. Okay. Other people think, you know, being constantly exposed to allergens, to pollution,
to mold, to dust, you know, can contribute to this, which is totally true. But I really think the
shrinking of our mouths, the shrinking of the sinus cavities really had a lot to do with why
we become such habitually poor breathers. And when I discovered that, you know, that
in the course of about 300 years, this, this came on from close to zero, not quite zero close to zero
to 90% of the population has some sort of malocclusion, which can impact your breathing.
And it shocked me because I didn't know that evolution, quote unquote, evolution could
act so fast across an entire population, but it can in a single generation. That's,
that's what we've seen. So yeah, I think it's the main driver. But, you know, I think there's
also an argument to be said that these other things have at minimum contributed to it,
us not being able to breathe properly. You've done a lot of research on the modern jaw. And I've
heard you speak about Darwinian dentistry. So I want to talk a little bit about the differences
in our jaws, our jaws versus our ancestors. What caused it and why this is important to our health?
You know, it's interesting. I borrowed that term, Darwinian dentistry from Randy Nessie,
who's a psychiatrist from the University of Michigan, now at Arizona. And he has had,
he created George C. Williams, an evolutionary biologist in the 90s, this whole area of evolutionary
medicine. So he calls, you know, Darwinian medicine. And he wrote a book called Why We Get Sick.
And I just was inspired by him and actually talked to him about creating a branch, if you will,
or an offshoot and just call it evolutionary oral medicine that specifically does the same
thing in terms of teaching students, pre-med and medical students and post postdoc training
residencies in all branches of medicine about evolutionary explanations for why we get sick,
the title of Nessie's book, and why do mouths get sick? Why do we get cavities? Why do we get
gum disease? Why do we have crooked teeth and poorly formed jaws? So that's kind of where
that came from. And I've since learned things by looking at skulls, mainly from the University of
Pennsylvania's Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology, studying with Mariana Evans, who is, she was in
the orthodontic department when I, with her, joined as a visiting scholar at Penn. And we x-rayed
with cone beam, you know, three-dimensional scans in her private practice. We would take skulls out
of the museum very carefully with permission and x-ray them and then compare them, the numbers
that we use, it's called supplementrics of how orthodontists and other dental practitioners
who provide orthodontic services to patients, they use those as norms. Well, the norms,
normative values for the lines and angles and how the, you know, the face should be shaped and the
jaw should grow are based upon a bunch of Caucasians from Cleveland area and in other places by a
couple of guys, Steiner and Downs and later a guy named the Bolton Brush norms, it's called from
Case Western. So we wanted to compare what we were getting on all of these people who died
before the Industrial Revolution in the 18th and 19th century and to come up with an anthropologically
correct base for looking at skulls. So that's how it all started for me. Okay. Okay. And what did,
what did you end up finding? I mean, there's obviously a vast difference, correct? Yeah. And
it's not, Mariana Evans and I, you know, we've worked really hard and long eight or nine years
now, we've been doing this and it's really informed the way we practice, but there's other people
who've done this. Jerry Rose is a dental anthropologist at the University of Arkansas,
where I am an adjunct assistant professor there working in dental anthropology with some of the
graduate students. And he's the one with Rick Robly, who's North of Doniston, Arkansas. They
worked together and wrote a paper. And what they discovered is that our jaws in the last, you know,
maybe a couple hundred years, that sounds like a long time, doesn't but consider it.
But it's really not. Well, it's really not. And what we call modern humans or anatomically modern
humans have been around for at least 250,000 years. And, you know, in order to survive childhood,
you had to have perfect jaws. The foundation for, you know, getting out of childhood was,
was you had to have that. So it's in our genome. But in the last couple hundred years,
since the Industrial Revolution, jaws have gotten narrower. They've gotten further back,
retrusive, and they've gotten longer. Okay. So our faces have gotten longer. Our jaws have gotten
narrower. And our faces have gone backwards. So we call that, you know, retro-nathia.
The Industrial Revolution, how specifically did that impact our jaws? What happened there
that's causing everything to get smaller? Well, we think, and the hypothesis that we've laid out,
speculation, if you will, is that it seems to coincide with women entering into the workforce,
the textile mills and coal mines. And, you know, they, and what did that mean? Well,
an ancestral pattern of nursing and weaning that went on, you know, pretty much for our entire
existence as anatomically modern humans over 250,000 years, was that a baby newborn was immediately
breastfed on demand for up to 10 to 12 months of age, maybe exclusively, but certainly the first
six, eight months, all they had was breast milk or they died. Well, that helped build
a tongue, a baby's tongue, starting in utero really about 20 weeks, is responsible for building
itself a home to live in for the rest of its life. And that's called the hard palate.
Every journey has a story. And the story of the Children's Airway First Foundation and how our
journey began can be found on our website under Savvy Story. In these next several segments,
though, you'll hear the personal stories of others and how their journeys have been impacted by
their airway disorders. Let's listen as podcast and airway advocate Emma Cooksey, blogger, sleep
and mental health advocate Kaisa Bradley, airways stenosis advocate Catherine Anderson,
and mother and author Kelly Richardson share their personal stories. So I know everyone has a
unique story. For those of you who don't know Emma and haven't ever heard her story on her podcast,
you can check it out. Go ahead and if you would just share a little bit about your story about how
you found out that you have an airway disorder. So as a child, I had huge tonsils. They called
them grade four. They were pretty much touching at the back of my throat. But I grew up, I'm in my
40s now. So I grew up in an era in the UK where they had swung from everybody having their tonsils
removed to no one having their tonsils removed. So in order to get your tonsils removed, you needed
to have a certain number of infections. Like people say, streps throat here, we say tonsillitis.
But I would always have three a year and they wanted me to have four. So clearly I was not
really that well and yeah, constantly having problems with my tonsils. I also had terrible
allergies. But at the time, I had a big allergy scratch test on my back. And so I had all of these
problems, which now in retrospect, I also was a nice breather because of what I had going on with
the allergies and the tonsils. And I definitely went through my childhood, my breathing all the
time could not breathe through my nose. Nobody ever mentioned that it was a good idea to breathe
through your nose. So I know that you know where this is going. So then as a teenager, I had four
teeth extracted. And I had retracted braces for almost three years. Yeah. And I just never really
felt well again after that process was done. It left me with a very small, you know, I already had
a small mouth and a narrow high arch palate and all these things. But nobody mentioned that there
was anything wrong with that. So I just always felt quite tired. But I think that during my teenage
years, I, you know, could explain it away with like, I'm doing a lot of stuff in high school. And
I'm busy and staying out later. Maybe that's why I'm so tired. Right. Then I started university.
And I was at university for four years. And during that time, I was always exhausted. And I would go
to like lectures at 9am in my pajamas and stuff like that. But of course, like I went to university
in Scotland where I mean, probably like any college, right? Like everybody's going out drinking all
the time. And so a lot of it could be explained away by I feel terrible, but then I have been
out really late and all these things. Right. So then after university, I spent a year traveling.
And that's when I really started thinking like there's something wrong with my health. So but I
started crying every morning in the shower, like every morning. Just an exhaustion. Yeah, just feeling
like when I woke up in the morning, I felt like I hadn't even gone to bed the night before. And I
definitely had a whole bunch of anxiety. And I would wake up with a pounding chest all the time
and really had every classic symptom mostly that knee. I hadn't really just because I was traveling,
I hadn't really taught to any doctors. Like I was starting to think there's something not right,
but I hadn't really taught to anybody about it. So then when I got back to Scotland, I was working
in Glasgow and I went to see GP there. And at that point, I kind of said like, this is all that's
going on with me. And, you know, mainly I feel terrible. And, and he did like all the blood work
and all the stuff. And came back and just was like, good news, there's nothing wrong. Like we can't
find anything wrong. And, you know, it's probably just stress all of my 20s. I went to the doctor
at least once a year to say, I feel terrible. I'm so exhausted. I feel anxious all the time.
And so I kind of, you know, was treated for anxiety, but nobody really got to the root of why I was
feeling that way. So I should just say, just so nobody gets confused at the age of 30, I'd gotten
married to my husband who is from the United States in Scotland. And then we moved to Florida when I
was 30. And I got pregnant right away with my first daughter. So then I would go to the doctor and
they would say, Oh, you're tired and anxious and exhausted because you're pregnant. So years and
years of just never getting to the bottom of what happened. So then I was 30 with my daughter was,
it was actually like no joke, like a week or two weeks after I'd been to the doctor and they said,
you're just tired because you have a newborn. And I took Katie to go see my mother-in-law and
she lives about 40 minutes away. And we were driving home across the Buckman Bridge here in Jacksonville.
And I just had that feeling that people have, you know, like driving where you have an intense,
I'm going to fall asleep. Like my eyes were just closing and it was really scary. And I just was
focusing on this truck. I was on like a four lane bridge filled with traffic and lots of trucks.
And I just started thinking like, I'm going to hit that truck in front of me. And so I can't
focus on the license plate. And then I had that momentary, like I fell asleep at the wheel.
And then the next thing I knew this like slow motion license plate of the truck in front of me
was coming towards me, like kind of slowly, but also fast. It was like the strangest thing. And I
slammed on my brakes and we didn't hit that truck by some miracle. So then when I got off the bridge,
I pulled over and I napped for like 20 minutes just to kind of take the edge off. And then I drove home.
And at that point, I just gave the baby to my husband. And I said, like, there is something
wrong with my sleep. But I called back that doctor who had just said, it'll all be fine.
And I said, there's something wrong with my sleep. I just, you know, I fell asleep at the wheel and I
almost got in a really serious car wreck. So at that point, they said, okay, maybe you should go
and have a sleep study. And so I had a sleep study. And I went to get the results and they said,
you have obstructive sleep apnea. And we're going to give you a CPAP. So I kind of left with more
questions than answers. So your story is, as I understand it, began in your early teens.
Yes, definitely. Yeah. But you weren't diagnosed or nobody addressed your issue at that point. You
didn't start, you know, just to kind of lay the timeline out. Your mental health journey didn't
really take on the form of a mental health journey until later, correct? Correct. I would easily say
until I was 19 or 20. You know, I think for me personally, like, I kind of went under the radar
because of that, because no one in my close circle believed in mental health. It was something we
just didn't talk about. You mean they thought it was, it just doesn't exist or it's... To be frank,
it's like take a pill and it'll go away. Gotcha. But like only if it's like really bad. And I feel
terrible that that was the attitude. But it was just, it wasn't something we talked about at school.
It wasn't talked about, you know, just it wasn't an opening. Not in your friend groups, not in your
family. It just wasn't talked about. No. And I don't, you know, I don't feel like my family,
like I don't put them at fault for not knowing. We just didn't know. They just didn't know. Yeah.
So it was just, okay, this is how we're going to balance the depression. This is how we're going
to balance the anxiety. And this is how we're going to balance the ADHD. And for the longest time with
ADHD, I thought that was just in boys. That's what I was taught. And I was just like, well,
this is just how my mind works. And it doesn't, it doesn't get better than this.
Now, when we diagnosed with ADHD, was that in middle school, high school? Was that in your 20s?
It's in my 20s. Okay. And just so our listeners will know, we will get to this because the
part of your hindsight, what we're finding out is at the core of this, does actually relate to
children's airway. And then that's why this is such an important message for parents to hear.
So at what point did you turn to your website, to your blogging, to become your platform?
Really, I know it started as dialoguing your journey, but it really has become this platform
that is now this outreach to others that have a very similar journey.
Yeah. So I want to say that it started sometime in 2016, 2017.
Okay. I don't, I don't remember the exact time, but I, I just remember I was sitting in a therapy
session with my nurse practitioner of mental health, and I wasn't doing very well. I,
we were trying all these different medications, trying to find the right mixture and levels.
I was sick a lot. And I just remember telling him, I am so frustrated with my lack of process,
like progress. I'm just so, I, like I just felt so cooped up in my own head. And he suggested,
he's like, Hey, you know, have you thought about writing things? Because of all the medications
that I was on, I wasn't safe to drive. So oftentimes my mom, she would drive me to my
appointments. And I was sitting in the car and I was telling her what we talked about in this,
in the therapy session. And she said, I'm going to take it a step further. I think you should
start a blog. Which, which absolutely makes sense. Now at that time, when you started your blog,
you knew that you had anxiety. You knew about depression at this point.
And your ADHD, correct? So you know those, those three. Yep.
What point did your diagnosis of sleep apnea, and then the hindsight, everybody,
let's look back and realize, Oh, wow, there was some kind of an airway issue way back here
that we miss. When did all of that transpire? Oh, probably. So I was diagnosed with sleep apnea
actually in the summer of 2017. And to be honest, finding the sleep apnea thing was a complete and
total fluke. Complete fluke. Really? How? Yeah. I was, I was talking with my nurse practitioner
of mental health. And I wasn't responding well to medication. I was improving with the blog, but
you know, that just kind of keeps me rolling, but not improving as far as you mean, like your
anxiety or ADHD that. Yeah. Okay. But something to note too is I was physically not functioning well.
I was not getting out of bed really. I was having a hard time eating. I was dealing with a lot of
headaches. Exhaustion. I remember sitting in my therapy appointment and my therapist for short,
he was like, Well, I think we should get your sleep study. We should check your sleep quality.
And I just looked at him like he was crazy. I was like, sleep is not the issue. I'm sleeping too
much. And I'm tired. Like I understand like, it's like, yeah, there's a problem with your sleep.
You're still tired after your sleep. But like in my head, it was crazy talk. I was like, no, no.
Which I think is very common for people. I sleep, I'm fine. That's not the problem.
Yeah. I realize it's the quality and yep. So today's discussion is a little different. And I
want to make sure we level set that especially with parents that listen to our show, the condition
that we're going to talk about specifically today, it is airway related. However, since it relates
mostly to adults, however, there is kind of a correlation that we wanted to make sure that
parents of younger children heard and especially, you know, those that are teenage and up. So
the organization that you're with is living with idiopathic subglottic stenosis. And it is a group
on Facebook that anyone can find, correct? Yes, that's correct. So let's go ahead and tell everybody
a little bit about what is idiopathic subglottic stenosis. Okay, so it sounds like a really fancy
name. Really complicated. But when you break it down, it's not as fancy as it sounds. Idiopathic
means we don't know what causes this. Subglottic is just the area just beneath your vocal cords. So
if you touch your neck and you feel it vibrate, just believe there will be your subglottis.
As this is the location of the next word stenosis, which means narrowing. And you may well hear
stenosis in relation to hearts and spines and all sorts of places where in your body way,
you can have stenosis. But this is a narrowing just below your vocal cords with no known cause.
So, but there are several causes that it could be. So they often start with idiopathic because
investigations need to be done in order to find out a bit more information. So,
right. And I think that's what makes everyone in our group with this condition. So,
I don't know, unique, I guess, because you hear the stories over and over. We were all
very healthy for the most part. We were athletes, we were active in our community,
acted with our families, and then boom, we have an airway disorder. Exactly. It does seem to come.
So for adults, it sort of appears generally 31, between 30 and 50, that's generally most patients.
And myself, I was 29. So it's at the lower end of that when I first had my symptoms.
But yeah, that's kind of the age group for adults. And yeah, it's very hard. I mean, one way your
airway can be damaged is if you've been intubated. And there's a bit of debate amongst doctors about
how long it is before scout issue will turn up in your airway if you've been intubated.
But generally, it's accepted that it's within two years of that operation. And often we'll
start wearing quite slowly but build up over time. At the moment, there's almost a pandemic of
this condition from airway intubation from COVID patients. Doctors around the world who are treating
our disease are treating many, many more patients. And they're people who've been in intensive care
with COVID and been intubated during that period. And now the airway is damaged. And they're coming
back later with this trouble with breathing. You know, I look at my story and I'm just
unbelievably grateful that I have a story to tell because we caught it early enough.
But what happened is my son, Finn, was born and I am a working mom. So my husband and I both had
jobs. We lived in Manhattan. It's not cheap to live in Manhattan. It wasn't like I was going to
take a year off. But I knew for those three months that I had that I thought, well, breastfeeding
is important and I'm going to make it go at it. But when he was born, he wouldn't latch well.
And when I mean he didn't latch well, it was a real struggle. I thought, okay, somebody's going
to have an amniotic. This happens probably more than not. People have this. So I asked the lactation
specialist there and they said, oh, you're just doing it wrong. Just adjust and keep pushing.
And they kept trying to give me ways of physically moving him, but it just wasn't working well.
And I was conditioned in a way to think, okay, nobody in the hospital seems to have answers.
And so this must, I must be an anomaly because if this is something that happened on a routine,
basically babies coming in and out of here, like, in my head, I see this all the time. So if this is
not working for me, then it's me. It's definitely me. Sure. Something's going on here. But after
that, right? Right. And so, but, and I also thought that somebody would have answers. And even within
that week, I had no answers. But I'll go back the next day after just trying to try my best.
I took that bottle that was in his little bassinet in the hospital and I stuck it in his mouth and
he's like, he is just sucking away. He is like trying to live. Here I am, trying a different
path and it's not working. And I just felt this huge relief that I can feed my child.
So we talk, we talked to the pediatrician about this. And again, nobody's alarmed. Nobody offers a
multiple solutions or reasons why it's just, oh, okay, well, he's losing weight. Here's a six pack
of formula. And I'm like, wow, this is great. Now, you know, I'm off and running. Sure. Right.
But at the same time, I was like, I bet you if I stick with this, it's going to work. So I, I'm
trying to nurse him at home and then pumping in between that, not much is happening there either.
So I was like, is definitely me. But I really went, went at this for like two months. Meanwhile,
I'm also supplementing with formula. So this is kind of my two months within. And it, he started
to gain weight, he was fine, but he needed the supplement of the formula. And okay, so after
about two months, I just said, this is, we're not getting very far. Let's just go straight to that.
And that's where we went. And when people or children or just anyone in general, when the
tongue is not in the roof of the mouth and Finn's tongue was not in the roof of his mouth, because
it couldn't physically stretch it up there. Nor did he know that it should be up there because
by introducing a bottle, I'm teaching him this tongue goes down. And then his cheeks, these
muscles are pushing in on the teeth. And for adults and or, you know, for children that have
posterior teeth, but, but you know, you're not going to notice this as a baby. But what'll happen is,
and I learned this when I worked at the Dawson Academy, Pete Dawson, he was one of the fathers
of occlusion, dental occlusion, and he would say when teeth and muscles war, muscles always win,
which means that the teeth are going to go where the muscles tell them to go. So if there's no tongue
in the roof of the mouth, and your cheeks are doing all of the work. So for Finn, he was sucking on
a bottle. Then we went to squeeze pouches. And the problem with these pouches is this is going to
continue to develop these cheek muscles, which are going to continue to push things in. And when
the tongue is not in the roof of the mouth, it's not going to develop out. So not only was the tongue
tie a problem for not being able to feed or breastfeed, it was a problem because he had a
recessed chin. And my husband's asked the doctors, you know, why is this chin so far back? You know,
like, oh, that's normal. It'll come in. Okay, great. It's coming in. All right. All right. All
of these already signs of disordered breathing or obstacles to proper optimal breathing were
already there. And I had no idea. In this next segment, we'll focus on healing and how we approach
patient care. Let's listen as Dr. Stephen Hall and Dr. Becky Andrews explain their approach
of healing from a more holistic position and how they challenge the status quo definition
of what healing could and perhaps what it truly should look like for both us and our children.
Right. I remember a day when I was a third year resident. So I was in my seventh year of medical
training. And I just finished my afternoon in the clinic. And I was walking back to the
resident's room to dictate my notes. And I was just thinking about the patients I'd seen that
afternoon and ask myself the question, well, what prompted them to actually pick up the phone,
make an appointment and come in? What are they really looking for? And I thought about, you know,
the person with hypertension and the person with diabetes and then I thought, well, what if they're
really looking for healing? And I stopped in my tracks because here I was in my seventh year of
medical training and I didn't know what healing was. I know. I bet that still boggles me. Yeah.
Yeah. And because for one thing, medicine likes to be a scientific endeavor, right?
And in science, we always define our terms so we have a precise language so that we all know
what we're talking about when we talk to each other. Which makes sense. Yeah. So how could there be
this multi-billion dollar science-based healthcare industry with no concept of health?
No true definition. Right. No true definition. So I thought, well, I got to remediate that problem.
So I started searching for a definition of health or healing. And seven years later,
I started to get an appreciation for why nobody did. Nobody's that one. Right.
Right. So but what I noticed in that time was that even though I didn't have a precise definition,
and I'd gone through several by that time, there were like one, there was back in that day,
there's an organization called the American Holistic Medical Association. And their definition of
healing was balance in harmony with the cosmos. And I thought, well, that sounds pretty good. But
how do you do that in the exam room? Yeah. I mean, that's kind of like, okay, Mrs. Smith,
today we're going to put you in balance in harmony with the cosmos. But what I realized later. Yeah.
Yeah, exactly. And what I realized later is, no, that's actually the effect of healing. That's not
what healing is. That's a result of healing that you come into that balance. Even though I didn't
have a definition of healing, I could kind of recognize it when one of my patients experienced
it. Yeah. And so I asked myself the question, okay, so by that time, I knew healing was more
than just how your physical body functioned. Obviously, you needed mental health too. And
you needed healthy relationships and all kinds of things, right? Healthy sleep,
that all kinds of things. So I got to thinking, well, so if if somebody has symptoms, that's a
clue that they need healing. And the resolution of the symptoms is a clue the healing has happened.
It's not the actual healing itself. So the symptoms, the clue, and when the symptom goes away,
that's a clue that it has happened. So I started looking at my patient, well, what else happened
to them then besides the resolution of their symptoms? And what I saw was that they had learned
something. And what they had learned almost inevitably had deepened their understanding of
themselves. It had given them a deeper perspective of who they were and it helped them be more in
their power and along those lines, right? And so I asked myself the question, well, what if that
learning about who they are is the actual healing? And again, that might just be a side effect of the
healing. But what that did was that got me focusing on, well, I want to when I'm treating a person,
I want the net result to be that they also deepen their understanding of themselves,
not just have the symptom go away. Right. And so I started looking for therapies that both,
you know, helped a person find the imbalance that's being expressed as a symptom and correct
and the imbalance, but at the same time, learning about themselves. So that's, that's basically
what I've been trying to do for the last 37, 38 years now at this point. So Western Medicine has
a fundamental assumption that disease can just happen. It can just be bad luck or it, you know,
like almost like an accident that you got this chronic degenerative disease, which in our philosophy
is that the body will heal itself if nothing's in the way, that our bodies have a natural inclination
towards homeostasis. And so as naturopathic doctors, instead of just trying to cut off and make, get
rid of the symptom or eliminate the symptom, we look at why is the symptom happening? What is that
telling us? And, and what we call it, we call it a find and treat the cause is one of the words,
the phrases that we use. And another phrase in our philosophy is remove the obstacle to cure.
And that one's a really, really, you see one that I've always really liked. And that is what is in
the body's way of healing itself. The other way we really are different from conventional doctors is
that we don't fragment care. So, you know, in the conventional system, especially now,
you've been, they pretty much don't have generalists. Like really, your primary care doctors have been
reduced, especially in here in Texas, what I've seen is primary care doctors don't actually give
care at all, unless it's just an antibiotic. Right. It's something response to somebody,
to somebody, some other specialist. Anyway, so I that that level of fragmentation, I think really
utterly destroys any hope of integrity of care. Right. And so the naturopathic doctors are trained
to look at all the systems. And most importantly, how they connect to each other. Right. And so,
you know, one of my favorite examples of this would be somebody that has, I think I would,
yeah, some, I'll just go ahead and give you an example now. Somebody like you say you have a
patient that has a sinus infection and has like IBS, and then they also have anxiety and depression.
Conventional medicine would send them to a gastroenterologist, an EENT, or an allergist,
and a psychologist or a psychiatrist. Correct. They would treat them as if those were three
completely separate things. As a naturopath, I would be like, hmm, that's all the same cause.
One of the areas we advocate for children's airway first is for airway examinations at birth.
In this segment, you'll hear how Dr. Tasha Terzo and Autumn Henning explain why these
early examinations and interventions are so critical for identifying the signs of airway
and oral facial dysfunction and in preventing long-term health problems. There's really no
good way to ask that. I mean, how do you approach that? You have a, yeah, 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, you know, 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. That'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 dysfunction? Yes, okay, can can be identified
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 torticolus. 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 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, I will go to
the delivery room with my mamas that I treat when they're pregnant, I was about to say at the baby
at birth, at birth, but you know, bring them to me a week later, I'm so 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. How do you as a parent
typically notice something like this or is or are there signs parents can see I mean,
obviously, you're not going to notice if the tongue is touching the back of the teeth or not.
But what signs is a parent can you look for, especially in an older child? So yeah, I mean,
it's interesting how a lot of things come back to myofunctional issues, right? And so we look
historically, you know, did they have early feeding, breastfeeding issues, things like that?
Do they have crooked, crowded, misaligned teeth? That tells us that the tongue is probably not
in the right spot. Are they a picky eater? And so they're having trouble chewing certain textures or
things like that. Do they breathe through their mouth or sore? That's a sign that things are not
developed well, there's an obstruction, whatnot. So there's lots of signs out there that can relate
back to the mouth. It's so interesting how the way we use our mouth affects things that are
seemingly not related. Right, that you don't think about like picky eater, for example. Yeah.
How does that correlate? So, you know, typically, oftentimes it goes along with tongue tie.
And when the tongue can't control the food well, what happens is kids get anxious, they gag,
because they can't move the food appropriately, or they spit food out, or they learn to like swallow
a hole. And so these kids have these bad experiences with a certain texture or type of food, and then
they start avoiding it. And we tend to think of it like, oh, they just don't like it, or they're
just being picky. When really, it's an actual physiologic issue. Along with airway dentistry,
one way we can improve oral facial health for children is through myofunctional therapy.
In this segment, you'll hear from Lauren Ruffridge, Karis Laguerre, Daniel Drew, and Brittany Bailey
on how myofunctional therapy can help children thrive physically, emotionally, and mentally.
So, as far as, you know, children's airway, the way that this kind of associates with us,
is I would, I can correct me if I'm wrong, it's going to be more on the medical side, right?
Because then you're dealing more with jaw development, high arch palates, tongue ties,
that kind of thing. Absolutely, yes. And so the way it also ties in is that I've studied
oral facial myofunctional therapy, which is what we'll be talking about a little bit later. And then
also oral restrictions or tethered oral tissues, which are more commonly known as tongue tie,
lip tie, cheek ties, or buckle ties. So cheek ties. Yeah, you can even have ties in the inside of
your cheek that can impact feeding. Those don't impact it the most when you're comparing to the
tongue and the lip, but it's all relevant to each individual. So I've done continuing education in
those areas, but they all tie into airway because everything starts with our airway. And if our
airway is not intact, and if we are not able to adequately breathe through our noses, which is what
we're supposed to be able to do, it then kind of has a ripple effect on the entire oral facial
structure, development, and the functions in which we use our mouth, our nose for. So breathing,
speaking, and eating. And eating. So that's kind of how it all ties in because those are the areas
that I'm working within. And the airway, of course, dictates so much more than most parents and
people know that. That's why I'm so glad that you're bringing awareness to this whole topic. And I
love everything that you guys are doing. I think it's wonderful. Yeah. Well, thank you very much.
Yeah. And really help us understand what tongue ties are. And if you wouldn't mind expanding a
little bit on that, because I didn't realize until recently there was something called a cheek tie.
I had no idea. And if you're working with a younger child, you know, is this something that,
if it were to happen to an infant, could impact something like breastfeeding?
Absolutely. So when we're talking about ties, and especially in the oral cavity, so in the mouth,
we're looking at the tongue as one. If you're looking at your tongue, there is a natural soft
tissue connection that everybody has. It connects the base of the tongue to the floor of the mouth.
Now some people have one that is short or very restrictive, so they can't get a lot of movement
from it. It's very tight, or it's just very short in length. And so they can't get optimal function
from their tongue. And our tongue has a lot of different functions that it has to perform.
So our tongue can elevate, it can protrude, it can lateralize, it can cut, it can retract,
it does all these different things. But if you've got a short connection or a tight connection,
that's a phrenum that is going to be impeding you from making a lot of those movements or from
doing so optimally. That's when we were considering you tongue tied. And very big on function over
appearance. So just because something looks like a tie doesn't necessarily means it is one. And
that's a whole another podcast for another day. Okay. So when we're looking at our cheeks, because
you just discovered cheek ties, and there's also lip ties top and bottom, there are little phrenums.
And if you've ever like done a scary face or you've ever flipped your lip at somebody for whatever
reason, why would you do something like that? Right. You probably see that connection. It goes
from the lip to the the ridge where the gum line of the teeth. And it goes from the cheeks on the
inside. If you ever take your tongue and you rub around. So sometimes those are also tight
and restrictive. And those can impede a lot of different actions. So it's going to impair for
children. When we're talking about babies specifically actually, when we're talking about the tongue
tied the tongue has to be able to come over the gum ridge that lower gum ridge in order to get and
compress against the nipple appropriately to get a great pumping action for breastfeeding, because
we've got to win a lot of that tissue and they've got to extract that milk. It's that liquid gold,
right? Right. You can't get it. If they are unable to move that tongue forward to that spot,
or unable to compress or lift up adequately against the breast tissue. So sometimes you'll
find that it's painful because they're using just that ridge as they're trying to compress
that tissue against the breast. And a lot of mothers are suffering with that. Sometimes they
can't get an open enough, uh, gait of the mouth. And so that's a flange when the breastfeeding,
they can't get that opening of the mouth because it's tight on the lips. Their lips just can't
expand to go up and over to really grab a lot of that nipple tissue or our sucking pads on babies
are very prominent and important because that's what they do. That's how they gain nutrition when
they're little. They have to suck either it's a breast or a bottle, but they're sucking in that
motion to gather the lich liquid. So those sucking pads, you might not be able to suck as adequately
your buckle ties or those cheek ties, name key that. So that's our babies. But then as you get
older, let's say we don't catch it when you're a baby, you get a little older and your child,
all of these can impact speech, feeding, breathing, sleeping in numerous ways. And it just compounds
as you get older and older. So get through childhood into adulthood. It's really going to be
our high risk people for acid reflux, different digestive diseases. A lot of them with obstructive
sleep apnea or just several sleep breathing disorders that we could go on and on about
the different manifestations that manifest so differently in everybody. But it is very important
to be aware of. So when you're resting your tongue and your roof of your mouth, we talk about this
a lot. And I've said another podcast, I always try to do this, which I'm sure parents are doing
when they're listening to it. We all try to do it. Yeah, exactly. What does it look like? So when
you're trying it at home, how do you know if you're doing this correctly or if you have a tie?
Oh, yeah. We want the tip of the tongue on the spot or right behind the two front teeth on that
little piece of skin where we typically maybe burn on a piece of pizza. And then we want the middle
and the back of the tongue fully up. And this is me all the time in sessions, putting my hands up.
This is your tongue. And if you're able to suction your tongue gently to the roof of your mouth
comfortably, that's kind of an indication maybe you don't have a tongue tie. But if you're
doing so and it's effortful, and there's other muscles that you have to engage,
like in your neck or in your eyes as you're lifting your tongue up, then that's kind of an
indication of either like a tongue tie or a tongue restriction. But it could also be low tone,
low tongue tone. And when you were talking about jaw surgery, I just kind of want to go back and
revisit that just for a moment because there are times, yes, that is the only option. I get that.
But it was kind of the way you said it that really resonated with me. So
you were being advised to do that more from just cosmetic. Yes.
When people are looking at it from, okay, wow, you have a retreated jaw, let's bring it forward.
So as a parent, how would you know the difference? How did your parents know the difference?
I agree with you. Time and place, it is definitely needed at times. For us, how we were being advised
for it, it wasn't for the root of the issue. It wasn't even for the issue. It was just like, wow,
you're really narrow palate. Your jaw is retro-nathic, pushed back. And so those are good points.
And we went into Mayo with the mindset of, okay, let's try this first. Because it was such a big
leap. And due to other layers I had, it was going to be really risky. And so we wanted to be fully
certain. And some people do go through Mayo and then they still need jaw surgery. But Mayo was a good,
let's narrow it down. Let's really learn deeper what's going on orally. And then after we've done
that, let's see what is needed for jaw surgery. And for me, it wasn't. No longer needed or recommended.
Wow. So the Mayo was enough to help with the retreating jaw in your case?
Yes. Wow. Yeah. So it's fascinating. My jaw was back, but really is because of my tongue.
And the tongue, it has a resting place. And for most people, prior to Mayo, it's low. It's on the
bottom of the mouth or kind of hovering or pushing forward on teeth. And especially at night, that
has the potential for the tongue and the jaw to slide back. But part of the Mayo goal pretty much
for everyone is to get the tongue up on the palate. And when you do that, the jaw automatically comes
forward. So for me personally, again, everyone's so different. I was able to learn a proper tongue
placement, which then rippled into the jaw alignment, which then helped my jaw joint,
the integrity of it and my clenching. And for me, those were just the missing puzzle pieces.
It wasn't something we needed to change structurally. It was more behaviorally.
Thanks for joining us for part one of our 2022 year and review podcast. If you're new to our podcast,
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From all of us at Children's Airway First, happy new year. Take care, stay safe, and happy breathing,
everyone.