Before reading this article, answer me two questions.
At this moment when you are concentrating on your phone, is your mouth slightly open or closed?
When you are relaxed, where does your tongue rest?
If your answer is not “closed” and “close to my upper jaw”, then you may want to continue reading.
We all have these people around us who always look like this
Or this
Do you have a family member or friend who sleeps like this?
We are also all familiar with this scene on public transportation
You should have noticed that everyone in the picture above is breathing through their mouths
Tell me, intuitively, do you think the guy in the picture below has a gleam of intelligence in his eyes?
Do you think he’ll be the guy who gets hit on by the girls at the party?
I don’t think so either.
After all, our aesthetics all lean toward the picture below, with relaxed lips, closed, and a calm face.
And the mouth breather looks like you just jumped out of the corner and scared him all day long
But what bothers us is why, even if all mouth breathers close their mouths for photos, we still find their faces unattractive
I heard that if I close my mouth, you will agree to go out with me?
In fact, dentistry has long been aware of the effects of abnormal oral posture on normal facial development, and there are several famous examples in history, and I’ll list a few here for you to visualize
The picture on the left is a picture of this girl at the age of six, when she had already started to have a very serious mouth breathing, almost all breathing is done by the mouth. At the age of nine, her picture appears on the right. We can all see the significant difference, and many would say that this child has grown disabled. Leaving aside the changes in her features, just look at the teeth that are crooked, with two incisors bucking out. Overall, the child looks unhealthy.
A highly respected dentist in foreign academia once said
If I see a child with misshapen teeth, I know the child is unhealthy”
Look at the child above, at this time ten years old, he should be considered a pretty handsome little square, with normal features, a shapely chin, and eyes that remind me of Mozart’s childhood portrait. His father, who was a doctor, bought him a hamster for his birthday one day. He kept his new friend in his own room. But what he didn’t even notice was that he was allergic to hamsters, so from then on his nose became inflamed due to an allergic reaction, thus completely blocking the nasal passage, and he started breathing through his mouth.
Seven years later, the change in his appearance was unbelievable.
We see his face has grown longer, his side nose appears large, his jaw is receding, his mouth is still slightly open, hungry for oxygen, and in a word, ugly, making it impossible to believe that these two sets of photos are of the same person.
In the congenital vs. acquired debate, siblings are always a good choice for an observational experiment. A pair of sisters in the UK, seven-year-old sister Kelly (left) and eight-and-a-half-year-old Samantha (right), sought medical attention for severe mouth breathing, and we can note that by this time their faces had begun to take on the features associated with mouth breathing
A few years later, the younger sister complied with the treatment and started to use the correct oral posture and swallowing style, while the older sister did not change.
Their facial development is shown in the figure below, where the two have similar genes, but their looks are worlds apart long before they reach puberty.
The girl on the left we say has a good looking face, her facial muscles are very relaxed and natural, and her face shape is in line with general aesthetics. The girl on the right, on the other hand, has a long face, and the muscles in the lower 1/3 of her face look tense because she tries so hard to keep her mouth closed during the photo shoot – she is used to having her mouth open.
Slowly, the oral experts concluded a pattern, mouth breathers almost always develop the same characteristics of the appearance. They also experimented with blocking the monkeys’ noses so that they had to breathe through their mouths, and not surprisingly, the monkeys’ faces began to grow longer, their pharyngeal tubes narrowed, and their teeth became uneven, just as they did in humans with mouth-breathing habits.
The cause of the abnormal facial development by mouth breathing is controversial in the dental community, with many experts believing that the prolonged flow and outflow of air in and out of the mouth is responsible for the narrowing of the pharyngeal canal and the crooked teeth. begin to suffer from cervical spine problems.
The first person in the orthodontic community to systematize the effects of posture on the human face and orthodontic treatment was British orthodontist John Mew.
In his early years of orthodontic treatment, he found that patients with poor oral posture and breathing habits would have their teeth rebound after a few years, while patients with normal posture would not return after treatment was completed. And he found that the faces of mouth-breathing patients grew up to be less than ideal, as the two sisters above had been his patients.
So he began to argue a hypothesis.
Incorrect oral posture will have an effect on breathing patterns and swallowing patterns, and subsequently
1. abnormal growth of teeth, causing occlusion problems
2. Long-term unnatural posture and malocclusion affects the development of our facial muscles and bones, affecting normal appearance, causing the patient’s face to develop narrower and longer. It also causes temporomandibular joint disorder (TMJ/TMD), which means that many people have painful jaw joint sounds when they open their mouths, and this disorder naturally limits the amplitude of the patient’s mouth opening.
3. The mouth breathing posture naturally causes the patient to lift the head upwards for the smooth flow of the airway, as shown in the figure below
The patient’s face begins to develop vertically rather than horizontally as it should, resulting in a sloping forehead, a forward-tilted head and cervical spine, and a deformed jawbone (observe the difference in the shape of the jawbone between the left and right pictures, with the left picture at 90 degrees and the right picture at a greater angle). The pressure of the head on the cervical spine can lead to a hunched-over posture, which later leads to various cervical and back problems. (Watch the necks of passers-by carefully when you go out, you will find that most people have different degrees of forward tilt, or you can look in the mirror)
4, children with adenoid hypertrophy, rhinitis, sinusitis can lead to nasal congestion, open-mouth breathing and snoring, and even sleep apnea (Sleep apnea), leading to various diseases such as inattention, reduced vitality (insufficient oxygen concentration in the body and brain) and various cardiovascular diseases, and many sudden deaths at night have also been confirmed to be related to this disease
It is worth noting that it is not the mouth breathing itself that causes these problems, but the mouth breathing position. That is, whether you breathe with or without your mouth, as long as your mouth is not normally closed, you will develop the mouth breathing facial pattern.
At present, most of the cases treated by Mew and his son are children aged 7-9 years old. Mike Mew said in his speech last year that he only accepts patients in this age group because this is the peak of facial bone development, plus it is easier for children to correct bad habits.
Oral posture and breathing patterns are critical to normal development and healthy living for all of us, yet we know very little about them. Chinese basic education devotes a lot of resources to teaching our children to solve useless competition problems, but never pays attention to the basics of teaching them how to use their eyes properly, sit properly and breathe properly, resulting in too many of our young people now being nearsighted, hunchbacked, long-disabled mouth breathers.
When Chinese parents see their children start to breathe through their mouths, most of them may not pay much attention to it because of the lack of information, until their children’s teeth grow crooked and their faces grow disabled, and they still don’t know why.