My view on releasing tongue ties

I think it is useless. But let me explain why.

So in 2015-16 I was on a tongue tie rampage. I was reading lots of stuff by the Mews and doing some online consultations with a myofunctional therapist.

I was doing tongue exercises like crazy for 1-2 hours per day.

And it felt like i’d plateaud quite quickly in the results I was seeing. So i started looking into releasing my tongue tie.

Mine probably looked a bit like the one in the ‘Before’ picture above. And for awhile I thought this was going to be the answer to all of my problems.

Not just me, but also my son who was around 2 years old at the time.

Boy was I wrong.

I had my frenulum ‘released’ 2x back in 2015-16

I was living in Vietnam at the time and found a doctor that did this on kids. In Vietnam it didn’t seem like many adults did this at the time, but he was happy to do it for me.

So I did it the first time. I had all three frenulum pictured above cut.

It didn’t hurt that much and was fast.

Plus as my myofunctional therapist instructed… I did myofunctional stretches like crazy afterwards.

But it didn’t seem like he’d gotten all of it. Or perhaps some of it came back.

And so some months later I did it again.

But even after doing it 2x I don’t think it made any meaningful difference.

Especially when I compared it to the results I achieved a little later on when I was using a Myobrace and doing the soft tissue stretches I’d learned.

With those I could see immediate cause & effect impact on my skull, my spine, and how I functioned.

With the myofunctional stuff I didn’t really see anything. Rather I would try to convince myself that perhaps i saw something.

But later on I realized the reality. That it was just a pipedream.

I also released my son’s tongue tie in 2016

My son was mouthbreathing already when he was a little over one year old. And it often disturbed his sleep.

It bothered me a lot because I’d already read so much about mouthbreathing in kids.

And so even when he was around 1.5 years old i started doing everything i could.

Taping his mouth shut. Giving him his own small Myobrace. etc.

But it didn’t help.

And so I thought releasing his tongue tie would be the magic bullet. This was around the same time that I decided to do my first release.

So we did it on him a little bit after i did mine.

But nothing changed. He still mouth breathed. He still didn’t sleep well.

It was a complete waste of time and effort.

Later we fixed my son by putting composite on his teeth

As i’ve mentioned in some past posts we put composite on my son’s back teeth in Fall 2021. This was quite a number of years after the tongue tie experiments of 2016.

And i was trying lots of stuff during those interim years between 2016 - 2021. But nothing really worked.

Till we put this composite on. Or as some dentists call it.. “Planas Tracks”.

It has now been a little over three years. Literally everything is fixed.

Mouthbreathing gone.

Sleep is awesome.

Mood has improved a lot.

And much more.

Why? Because putting compsite adheres to my two principles for how to fix this stuff:
(1) Add vertical height
(2) Don’t lock an occlusion

And releasing tongue ties…. does neither of these.

So I concluded that releasing tongue ties is useless

Many years have passed since my son and I had our tongue ties released and I have never even considered doing it again. Nor have I ever recommended anyone else do it.

For the simple reason that I think it is useless.

It does nothing to stretch the soft tissue that I talk about.

And in around 2016 when I first started figuring out how the soft tissue worked it was like I was seeing the truth.

I had managed to completely release the soft tissue, which allowed the jaw, neck and spine to reposition.

From that point on the problem was simplified. Anything that stretched the soft tissue was good and anything that didn’t was useless. Because I had seen how the whole mechanism worked.

And releasing a tongue tie was obviously not part of it.

It was a side show.

And a useless one at that.