Indexed splints and the magical "perfect jaw position"

Hint... it's more complex than you probably thought it would be.

So to set the context on this one…. a number of folks have asked me what I think about “Mewing world” over the past couple of months.

And I honestly don’t know much about them except that they run the tooth-for-a-tooth.com blog that i’ve known about for years. Mainly because I first knew about their Zub-za-zub.ru blog that is in Russian and is very popular in the Russian speaking world.

I lived in Russia & Ukraine for almost a decade and speak & understand Russian pretty much fluently so i used to read the Russian version a bit back in the day.

I heard that it’s run by two Russian ladies, Anna and Lilia, who I believe were in the old Starecta Facebook group back in 2016-18 when we used to discuss a lot of this stuff. And where a lot of ‘OG’s’ like Marcello and myself got our start.

There are a number of posts about Marcello, Starecta, the Mews and I even appear a couple times.

Anyway I have nothing against them. But I saw that they were promoting the idea of ‘polymorph pads’, which are essentially the polymorph clipons that Marcello and I used to play around with back in 2016 - 2017.

And so I thought i’d use this as context to lay out my views on the ‘perfect jaw position’ because I think it is more complex than folks think.

What is the right position of the jaw?

This is a question I used to think about a lot back in the day.

Mainly because I started with Starecta in late 2014 where the thinking was that you needed to center the jaw to the skull by registering a bite while making the letter ‘O’ with your mouth.

And this for me would end up putting my bite in slight protrusion at first. But then it started moving to more edge-to-edge the more I continued with the Starecta process.

And I interpreted this as progress. But then it felt like I’d plateaud and at some point even felt like i’d regressed.

So i was confused… Is this really the right jaw position?

And if not, what is the right jaw position so that your bite improves?

The search for the right position

Back in 2016-18 I was experimenting like a mad man trying to figure out the answer to this question.

And i’d use a lower splint that I would then ‘register’ a bite with polymorph. Basically you put soft polymorph on the splint, set your jaw into the position you want, and make an impression.

Then you would let the polymorph cool and harden and it would hold your jaw in that position while wearing the splint.

The splints would look a bit like this one just above.

I began testing all kinds of theories. I’d register in protrusion (with jaw as forward as I could put it), retrusion (jaw as far back as I could put), and even on either side (left and right).

For a little while (like a week or a couple weeks) i’d often think I was improving. But then after a month or a couple of months i’d start to doubt myself and change it to something else.

In reality I was just going in circles.

The tracking splint lights the way

When i discovered the ‘tracking splint’ sometime around 2017 this really helped to serve as a sort of map.

I talk about what it is here:

A 'tracking splint' is the compass for your TMJ journey

Now I would have a separate ‘tracking splint’ where i would track how my dental contacts evolved.

And when i coupled that with my understanding of the curve of spee a little while later, I now had a way of knowing whether a certain bite position was improving things or making them worse.

So i logically thought i’d now figure out the ‘perfect bite’ and i’d be well on my way.

Except it didn’t happen. I’d register various jaw positions and i might improve for awhile. But then i’d plateau and even start to get worse with the same bite position.

It was confusing as hell.

And this is why thousands of people have went in circles with these concepts for the past decade.

Marcello and the dual-positioned splint

Enter Marcello in early 2018 with his concept of the ‘lingual bite’.

Basically the idea was that you needed 4 separate bite positions in a healthy functioning mouth. This was his FB message to me around that time.

• ‘E’ was when you pushed your jaw back as far as you could.

• ‘A’ was the jaw’s rest position’.

• ‘O’ was when you formed the letter O with your mouth.

• ‘U’ was when you pushed your jaw forward into protrusion as much as you could.

And you could achieve these 4 bite positions by basically registering a bite in two different jaw positions (O & E). Which meant that first you would take an impression in polymorph with the jaw in the O position and then you’d push the jaw back into E and register that as well on the same splint.

Then when you let it dry & harden, you’d have both bite positions on the splint and your jaw would naturally move between these various positions as your head assumed different nodding positions on the neck (as you see below).

And voila! As I was doing this I noticed from the tracking splint that i would continue to make progress instead of plateauing or backsliding.

Eureka! The jaw needs different positions to be healthy and not have the soft tissue ‘deflate’!

Reviv One is available at www.getreviv.com

But then I realized you could achieve results in a simpler way

As I was doing my tracking splint experiments I realized that I could also continue to make progress simply by making my contact flat (on a flat plane splint).

Or by using a rubber mouthguard (i used the myobrace a1 at the time).

And so it seemed that you could EITHER register a bite in all four lingual bite positions OR you could simply wear a rubber mouthguard.

And in fact the rubber mouthguard approach seemed to work even faster, as evidenced by the changes in the tracking splint.

And this came as a relief to me because honestly the lingual spint that Marcello recommended was a bit of a pain in the ass. lol

If you are registering a single bite position, you are wrong

So now I get back to this idea of the polymorph pads from Mewing World. They are making the same mistake as Starecta does.

Both advocate registering only a single bite position. As they’re basically saying to register ‘O’ here in this post: https://tooth-for-a-tooth.com/starecta/selfmade_rectifier/

Which is dated… because Marcello than evolved from this into the lingual splint in the year or two following this.

And if they learned to use a tracking splint and actually saw how the dental contacts evolve when they do this… they will find that pretty much everyone doing it will eventually plateau and then probably go in circles.

And I would put money down right now.. that if you dig up these folks that are registering a single bite position.. that is going to exactly be their experience as the years roll on.

And yeah… it won’t matter how much Mewing they are doing on the side.

I ran these experiments many times back in the day and so did Marcello.

Closing thoughts

The point of today’s article is to raise the point that there is no single ‘perfect’ occlusion where you can just set your bite and forget it.

Rather the truth is more likely closer to what Marcello concluded back in 2018. That you need to have numerous bite positions supported by the teeth in order to keep the soft tissue stretched and the skull ‘inflated’.

The good news is that there is a far easier way to achieve this. And that is by sticking to my two rules:

• Add vertical

• Unlock the occlusion

And so you can just wear a rubber mouthguard and continue to improve for a long long time.

Then when you’re done you either put flat composite or you continue wearing your mouthguard to sleep.

P.S.

If you want to know more about Marcello, I wrote an article about him here.

My thoughts on the 'Biomechanical Dystonia" approach

Even though he’s exited this stuff years ago…. I still consider him one of the best thinkers in the game.