13 April 2021

There are huge forces and counter-forces at work in our mouths. If we take care to balance these forces harmoniously (our tongue provides the right load on our teeth from the inside and our facial muscles provide support from the outside), we can speak clearly and articulately and develop a beautiful smile. As you may have read in our previous blog article, the most commonly trusted professionals for complex orthodontic treatment are speech and language therapists. Know [...]

Swallowing consists of two phases: a voluntary oral phase (chewing, chopping, moving the bite backwards) and a much faster, reflexive pharyngeal phase (larynx rises, airways close, bite enters the oesophagus and then the stomach). If the problem is seen in some stages of the oral phase, we speak of tongue thrust swallowing (myofunctional dysfunction), a type of muscle dysfunction. What could be wrong with this?