Signs and Symptoms

Mouth breathing is not normal. There are many negative effects that come from mouth breathing. When a child primarily breathes through their mouth, it will detrimentally affect their facial growth. Mouth breathing in kids and adults can lead to sleep apnea. It also has impacts your oral health, ability to breathe through your nose and increases snoring.

Chronic mouth breathing, oral habits like thumb sucking, and soft diet with minimal chewing during the high growth period will lead to long, narrow facial development. This leads to increased dental crowding and can exacerbate sleep problems.

Restricted tongue mobility due to tongue tie or lack of tongue tone can contribute to chronic mouth breathing. It can also lead to picky eating, gag reflex, cavities in teeth, and eventually problems like temperomandibular joint pain and neck tension.

Chronic mouth breathing and oral habits contribute significantly to crowded teeth. If we are able to intervene early when there are signs of under development, we can prevent costly orthodontics in the future. We are recommending orthodontic intervention as early as age 3-4 years old! If we wait until the adult teeth are in, a lot of the growth is complete and harder to guide.

Picky eating can be related to restricted oral tissues such as tongue tie and lip tie! These restrictions can make it hard to move food around especially if it is harder to chew. This can cause kids and adults to gag on more types of food and create aversions to those types of foods. Restricted tissues can lead to sensory problems with different types of food.

If any person is unable to sleep they are going to have difficulty paying attention. Kids are getting diagnosed with ADHD more frequently now and many of those kids are just unable to get restorative sleep. There can be many reasons for this, but if you OR your child are diagnosed with ADHD, come speak with us about potential sleep disorders.

Many adults with restricted or poorly toned facial and tongue muscles are presenting with chronic neck tension and headaches. Myofunctional therapy and functional frenuloplasties are helping many of those adults find relief.

No matter how normalized it has become, snoring is NOT normal! It causes repeated trauma to your soft tissues all night long that has been correlated with issues such as tinnitus. It can be associated with sleep apnea and poor sleep quality. There are ways to manage this and not all require CPAP.

Restricted oral and facial tissues can contribute significantly to poor posture and also temperomandibular joint pain. Pain in your jaw joint can be complex and related to multiple etiologies. It can even be related to a seemingly innocuous incident that occurred when you were a child. Let us help you figure out how to improve your discomfort, clicking and popping.