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[Dunamisdeos]

I mean is he asking for money or other support, such as his product he's selling to fund his research? If not he's probably just got an idea he's trying out.

Is he asking people to avoid regular orthodontics, or something?

[nenjin]

https://orthotropics.com/dr-mike-mew-bds-lon-msc-orth/

His dad has a book for sale.

His take on Orthodontics as its stands now is:

-It is very lucrative.
-It's still a fairly young discipline, so we're only starting to see the long-term effects of it in the first few generations that have lived with braces growing up.
-That braces might be treating the symptom rather than the root cause of crooked and impacted teeth, and that maybe wiring all your teeth together doesn't do good things for the underlying bone structure that support them, the soft tissue that surrounds them, etc... That how your face and jaw sits has an impact on other things like what's going on in your sinuses, sleep apnea, and other things. I couldn't tell for sure but he seemed to imply that he thought retainers, while a lot less popular, had a more holistic impact on people's faces than trying to force all their teeth into alignment with steel. Although further reading seems like they're both problematic.

(I can kinda relate. I had a retainer to push forward an adult tooth that had grown in behind a baby tooth. Wore it for like three years. Hated it, but it did the job. Every time I went in to the orthodontist he'd tighten that son of a bitch down like he was doing lugs on his spare tire. One day at school lunch I was dumping out my tray and my retainer fell out of my mouth, as it was wont to do, right in to the trash. And I just said fuck it, that's a sign. Never saw him again. In general I have pretty straight teeth though.)

The crux of his argument is Evolutionary Medicine, and maladaption. He makes the bold claim that all our ancestors had straight teeth, almost all animals except domesticated ones and genetic freaks have straight teeth, and that our ancestors ate harder, less calorie dense foods and used their jaws much more than we do today. The softer food, the need to eat less of it, has in a sense robbed our teeth of the need to be straight. Things get mushy and teeth start crowding. So short of eating uncooked vegetables, raw nuts and roughly butchered meat, he's advocating other methods to try and give our jaws back the work they're evolutionarily designed to do. (Chew more gum, at a minimum. Maybe he's got stock in some gum companies, who knows.) And it does not stretch the imagination very far to see that kind of preventive maintenance putting a serious dent in the Orthodontics industry, who have entire societies on the hook for tens of thousands of dollars over a life time possibly, continuing to treat the symptom rather than the cause. You would think, if his theories are actually right, that they'd want to embrace it the way doctors tell you to exercise and watch your diet so you don't develop all the problems that bankrupt you later in life.

I kinda realized I've been "mewing" most of my life because as a kid after getting caught with my mouth just hanging agape like an idiot a few times and being really embarrassed, I started consciously and subconsciously working to keep it closed.

I dunno. It's not even close to hard science, it's not psuedo science, it's basically broscience of health. But the idea that little shit you do or don't do adds up over time is a fundamental rule of life. And stating that seems like a weird thing to try and revoke someone's license over.

[Max™]

In order to press your tongue to the roof of your mouth you need to resist with the muscles that keep your jaw closed. I do a voice which winds up sounding like Meatwad from Aqua Teen where I do that and talk nasally, I've done it enough that flexing my jaw muscles makes my ears pop and my beard wiggle. Repeated use of an underutilized muscle is nothing to laugh at.

Anyone here able to armpit fart? I mastered this useless talent when I was a young teenager, later I had to do very strange workouts to balance the rest of my left deltoid with the one that does the raising motion, and catching my left tricep/bicep up to the right ones I engaged making the sounds took some extra care. I can do it with my palms on any slightly squishy surface, my knee, eye socket, chest, elbow, my other hand, someone elses hand, the side of a fridge, roof of a car, and so forth.

As for insurance, I went through a course to sell insurance, by the end of the course I kinda wanted to die, as monstrous as some of my impulses may be towards those who abuse power and bully the weak may get, the insurance industry is so much worse.

I love animals, humans included for the most part, though they may be frustrating and hateful cuntsacks at times. I hate seeing them in pain, yet I understand why a predator hunts, hunger hurts after all.

The insurance industry is a predator that preys on the weakest at their lowest, and rather than singling them out to finish it, they string the whole herd along, taking bites and chunks from as many as they can, as long as they can, on the vague promise that should a lion come after the herd, they'll try to fight it off.

Unlike a normal predator though, insurance companies never get hungry, greed doesn't make you fold in half with anguish if left unsatisfied, and greed doesn't want to stop and rest after a huge feast.

[Trekkin]

Yeah, it's a fairly classic conspiracy theory -- and, with apologies to smjjames for the slight derail, it's illustrative of why conspiracies of this type work and how they embed themselves into politics, so as a case study in modern American political dysfunction it has some merit here.

At the core of every conspiracy theory there's a gap, if you will, a hole in the shape of a demonstrably probative data set that would demonstrate the falsifiable claims of the conspiracy to be true and that no one in the conspiracy actually has. The rest of the conspiracy canon consists of a series of tactics to encourage you to ignore, dismiss, or minimize any concerns about that lack of data. As seen here, generating a narrative about how persecuted the theorists are is an extremely common way to combine forbidden fruit with an entertaining story. You want to know What They Don't Want You to Know, and everyone loves a good underdog story, so hey, two birds with one stone. It also has the effect of encouraging you to identify with the conspiracy and the conspirators simply by listening to them. You are, after all, one of the insiders now, and all the sheeple just don't know what you know. So, how valuable would you prefer to believe this knowledge is -- and by extension, how much better than the sheeple you are for knowing it to be true? And thus does it become more preferable to believe, and the belief that all contrary evidence is fake naturally follows.

In reality, this sort of claim -- cheap, probably harmless, and simple -- is well within the wheelhouse and budget of a number of government-funded science initiatives across the country. A grant for this would be really easy to sell, too, just on a public health basis, and the tricks to get something like this through an IRB aren't hard. Sure, he can't charge for it, but how much better if he could compensate them, like in a proper study? He could even pay himself a salary for it out of the grant, including just for analyzing the dental X-rays. Then he could write a real paper, stick it in a proper peer-reviewed journal, and actually have accomplished something worthwhile. That is not hard for anyone with any business claiming to know anything about medicine.

Instead, he's done the standard pseudoscience end-around run and presented anecdotal "findings" to the public without putting them through peer review. That's really dangerous; every time we let a doctor present unreviewed bullshit to the public, we make it easier for them to ignore real medical and scientific expertise, and people suffer for it. It is also possible, as Mew has demonstrated, to put together enough of a scientific facade to fool laypeople without a shred of real proof, and sucker a lot of people into trying a lot of unhelpful things. Loudly and utterly destroying the career and credibility of mistakes like him is not only just, it is literally the least we can do if we want science to have any meaning at all.

it's basically broscience of health. But the idea that little shit you do or don't do adds up over time is a fundamental rule of life. And stating that seems like a weird thing to try and revoke someone's license over.

No, peddling broscience is a totally valid thing to destroy a man's career over, because how the little shit adds up matters immensely.

[Dunamisdeos]

I do a voice which winds up sounding like Meatwad from Aqua Teen where I do that and talk nasally, I've done it enough that flexing my jaw muscles makes my ears pop and my beard wiggle.

Cool so this is you in me head now, with the voice and constant beard wiggles.
 
Also, insurance industry is indeed evil and awful. I don't think I could do it. They'd fire me for cutting breaks to people when I wasn't allowed, or some such thing.

[nenjin]

To note, the entire field of dentistry tends to be various degrees of quackery. I can't say who's right and who's wrong with this, but we know who suffers in the end.

I gotta say I've always appreciated your ability to source, if nothing else, really engaging articles.

No, peddling broscience is a totally valid thing to destroy a man's career over, because how the little shit adds up matters immensely.

"Peddling broscience" would be "Pay for Access To The True Tooth Club and I'll give you monthly secrets that your Dentist and Orthodontist DON'T want you to hear! $39.99 a month for forever teeth!" This man has a theory that he's investigating as part of a regular practice. The same way I saw a sinus surgeon put up his own youtube videos saying "hey, stretch your sinuses. I admit I do not have the medical research to back up my claims and I cannot in good conscious make them as a sinus surgeon. But I have anecdotal evidence that stretching them out can improve their function and prevent issues down the road." As someone with sinus problems, that I had a massively invasive surgery to correct, I tried it. I think it's been helping. It cost me FUCK ALL.

I have more respect for that attempt that someone shitting on something that literally cannot cause harm, simply for the egotistical benefits of doing so. If conspiracy theories are the currency of American politics and that's bad, shouting down everything as a hoax is the current of the Internet.

[hector13]

I do a voice which winds up sounding like Meatwad from Aqua Teen where I do that and talk nasally, I've done it enough that flexing my jaw muscles makes my ears pop and my beard wiggle.

Cool so this is you in me head now, with the voice and constant beard wiggles.
 
Also, insurance industry is indeed evil and awful. I don't think I could do it. They'd fire me for cutting breaks to people when I wasn't allowed, or some such thing.

Nah, they have a test for humanity. If you have any, you don’t get hired.

[Trekkin]

I have more respect for that attempt that someone shitting on something that literally cannot cause harm, simply for the egotistical benefits of doing so.

There's inherent harm in putting the imprimatur of medicine on that which is not scientific, because then it makes it easier for people to go point to it later and say "well, a doctor said that, too. pfft, doctors, am I right?" and take laetril instead of chemotherapy drugs or avoid vaccinations or something. People don't need a good reason to do the easy alternative to something hard or unpleasant, even if it doesn't work. They just need an excuse. Every time we give them that excuse, we effectively make real medicine harder on a societal scale.

[nenjin]

and take laetril instead of chemotherapy drugs or avoid vaccinations or something

The two things we are talking about are not equivalent and you know it. He's talking about simple oral posture and facial muscle strength and things you can do about that, and how it may! may! affect the shape of your face, how crowded your teeth are, and other things.

You're talking about taking cancer drugs or not taking cancer drugs.

People don't need a good reason to do the easy alternative to something hard or unpleasant, even if it doesn't work.

What about an alternative to something that is incredibly expensive and possibly overtreatment, as Ispil's article so clearly makes the case for. Orthodontal work is a sub discipline of denistry and in many, many, many, many cases is elective.

Every time we give them that excuse, we effectively make real medicine harder on a societal scale.

The implication being that it didn't take "real medicine" to get to where he is at now. He went through all the schooling and the certification, started his own practice, just to declare that no one should ever see an Orthodontist. Which is not what he's saying, or he'd never have had a job in the first place. (Still might not!)

It's not that I even disagree with your premise that broscience and encouraging people not to listen to medical professionals is bad. It's that it reeks of a reflexive dismissal, rather than a studied one, summed up in your cheeky checkpoint conspiracy that anyone who has read this thread for a decent amount of time now recognizes from you.

I didn't set out to watch a 50 minute video about Orthodontics. But I ended up watching the entire thing. The personal angle it has for him makes it that much more interesting, and if I'm honest, reflects some of my experiences with my Orthodontist. They stuck my brother in braces despite him having pretty damn good teeth already, and after just a couple years he told them he was done, while they wanted him to keep wearing them all through high school. They tried to do the same thing for me but I straight up refused.

[Trekkin]

Yeah, because it didn't. He got where he got, and then he stopped doing real medicine. This sort of thing is part of why dentistry and especially orthodontics is the mess that it is: because we don't vet proposed procedures with enough rigor. The solution is not to welcome more insufficiently-researched pseudomedicine. The solution is to actually do the longitudinal studies required to establish how to predict long-term outcomes and set standards of care based on that as we refine our understanding, and keep doing that continuously.

As to your larger point, you're absolutely right: it's absolutely a reflexive dismissal, because that's required of scientific inquiry. It's part of the fundamental tradeoff surrounding the practice of science: findings can be helpful even if they're wrong so long as we follow correct procedure, but they're worthless even if they're right unless and until we do. We can't do anything with them; there's necessary metadata for us to integrate new information into our existing understanding in a rigorous way that anecdotes just don't have. The rest of the process from grants to publications is built on that, and with good reason: this is the best tool we have to believe as many true things and as few false things as possible, but it's very fragile and hard to tell when it breaks.

If I had come across this idea on a review board or something as a theoretical possibility, I'd certainly be skeptical, but it'd have the necessary surrounding information for the proposal to be evaluable on its merits, and I certainly wouldn't be dismissive. (I'd also be deeply confused as to why it got handed to a computational biologist for review, but it's not impossible.) It's like the difference between the statements "pi is less than two" and "pi is green." The first one is wrong, and we can prove it. The second one is pointless because we can't; the only possible answer is "come back when you have something scientific."  Going before the public and saying "maybe pi is green, I don't know, I'm just asking questions" is not something anyone with any credibility should do.

[nenjin]

He has a research methodology, some of which is shown in the talk I watched. Does it meet the level of what the various boards in Britain expect? Hard to say because _there are no standards in this field._ In lieu of actual standards for research in his field, he's using what he's been taught. (Measuring the distance between teeth change over time using his methods, point by point diagrams of the face changing over time, heat maps of high and low points in the face, angles of reference, etc...)

For a discipline that has admittedly lagged behind the times, is not good at self accountability, does not have anywhere near the scientific or medical research rigor that normal medicine does, it makes that much more suspect that he's been dismissed out of hand when there are next to nothing in terms of other studies about the efficacy of normal treatment procedures and hardware, other than "hey their smile looks better." And according to him half of these corrections just fall out of place later.

He's not just asking questions, he's attempting to explore the data and he's trying to be shut down in that endeavor before he can ever have a chance to collect it in exactly the kind of longitudinal studies you say they need more of.

Maybe if you hadn't dismissed it out of hand you'd have seen some of that attempt.

[Trekkin]

The "according to him" running through that is the major methodological problem here, and the one exacerbated by his rush to present. If he has proof that half those corrections fall out of place, that would itself be publishable. If he has new metrics for quantifying orthodontic effectiveness, the same thing would apply. Neither of us could find anything published to that effect.

In the absence of that, putting any of this where the public can find it just invites people to skip all the fiddly steps in figuring out if it works or how it works or why it works or when it doesn't work and just do it without anyone knowing how to check whether what they're doing is right. We need at least a validated mechanistic explanation to start that process.

See, without some way to plug what we want to test into science on a mechanistic level, what he's proposing isn't so different from the folks who used to strap weasel balls to their thighs as a contraceptive or bleed people to make them feel better; if we don't know how it's supposed to work, we don't know how to test what's actually working, if anything, and no amount of anecdote can get us to that mechanistic hypothesis.

We both looked for the things that would let me do something other than dismiss this out of hand. Neither of us found them. In light of that, what he has done is spectacularly irresponsible.

[wierd]

Indeed.  He needs independent review and replication.

However, modern science in general has a "replication crisis" going on;  Many things published today are difficult if not impossible to reproduce by a 3rd party these days, and that's terrible.

Part of it is grant money and equipment, part of it is just bad science via politics, and it's hard to tell where the line is some times. 


In this case, it should not be too terribly hard for a research assistant to request a grant to conduct a limited trial experiment to validate the proposed processes with a randomized participant sample, and then do a post experiment followup at 6mo, 1 year, and 5 years.  That would be enough to make Trekkin happy, as long as proper protocols were followed.

(In terms of determining a causal mechanism aside from exerting of lingual pressure at the hard palate as the controlled variable, that would only be sensible to research after first doing independent testing on if lingual pressure actually does what is claimed first.  Asking for grant money to test some strange device intended to substitute and apply finer controls than having the participant press their tongue on the roofs of their mouths for so many seconds each day is nonsense without first providing some kind of verifiable evidence that lingual pressure, which the device would be intended to stand-in for, actually has an effect.  Otherwise, it's like those bullshit bomb-detectors.)

[Trekkin]

In this case, it should not be too terribly hard for a research assistant to request a grant to conduct a limited trial experiment to validate the proposed processes with a randomized participant sample, and then do a post experiment followup at 6mo, 1 year, and 5 years.  That would be enough to make Trekkin happy, as long as proper protocols were followed.

Well, "happy" would involve some sense of the underlying biophysics so we could tease out a way to objectively validate patient compliance with the key elements of the technique (and, therefore, what those elements are.) It'd be much better than what we have now, though. You're correct in pointing out that the mechanism would necessarily be somewhat speculative, though, which is where we get into a chicken-and-egg problem: we can't test the device without knowing the technique does anything, but we can't test the technique without being able to verify people are doing it, for which a device would be very helpful. Having a proposed biochemical marker for compliance would probably resolve that to everyone's satisfaction.

[wierd]

Near infrared cameras could detect compliance;  Exerting lingual pressure will increase metabolic needs for glucose in the oral cavity, which should result in a net-rise in temperature at that location.  It should be indicated by a local increase in temperature on the underside of the floor of the mouth.

Calibration would need to be carefully monitored though; Major arteries are in that area which could throw off the readings.  Other kinds of compliance monitoring could introduce new variables to the experiment that are undesirable.

Other factors could be collected as well, such as blood pressure and heart-rate.  Stressful activities are known to increase both, and it is presumed that having to hold your tongue firmly in the roof of your mouth with some lab-coated goon staring at you with a fancy camera is going to be unpleasant.  It would provide additional data to help calibrate the NIR data against. (EG, how much temperature rise was associated with emotional distress, vs actual metabolic need increase.)