Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine - Mewing

Episode Date: February 9, 2021

Would you believe that without spending a single cent, with just a slight movement of your tongue you could breathe better, sleep better and perhaps even ... become your most beautiful self? You probably wouldn't believe that, because you listen to Sawbones. You probably would believe that the simple, possible effective technique called "Mewing" has been co-opted by incel culture though, right? Yeah, that sounds like Earth.Music: "Medicines" by The Taxpayers

Saw bones is a show about medical history, and nothing the hosts say should be taken as medical advice or opinion. It's for fun. Can't you just have fun for an hour and not try to diagnose your mystery boil? We think you've earned it. Just sit back, relax, and enjoy a moment of distraction from that weird growth. You're worth it. that weird growth. You're worth it. Alright, talk is about books. One, two, one, two, three, four. We came across a pharmacy with a toy and that's lost it out. We were shot through the broken glass and had ourselves a look around.

Some medicines, some medicines that escalate my cop for the mouth. Hello everybody and welcome to Saabone. It's a marital tour of a Don't Know I say that like Oprah. It's a marital tour of a skydend medicine. I'm your co-host Justin McElroy. And I'm Sydney McElroy. I got really excited because I thought maybe I was doing a show with Oprah for a second. Yes. And then I remember it's you.

Oprah and I have many similarities. But the number one is that we both have our own cable network. Yes, and I remember it's you Oprah and I have many similarities But the number one is that we both have our own cable network number two is we do intros the same way Where is this cable network? What where is it? Did I do I get to know about it? What do you put on it? It's actually is programming. It's spike That's not true. I own spike. It went under I own, I own CNBC. You know, it's sad because if you know the way to impress me would be if you owned HGTV. That's true.

Or food network. Oh, yeah. Sorry, I own spike. But if you want to watch like bar rescue or something, I've got you. The bar rescue guy and I are like best friends unless he's usually problematic in which case, I don't know him. I am totally neutral about that. I have never watched the show.

I'm aware it exists. Yeah. These are the statements I will make about that. That listen, we've gotten horribly off track, even for us, extremely early. This is a topic, Sidney, that I sort of brought to you. You did. For a change.

And I was very concerned, can I say when you asked me about it? Because I had just coincidentally read an article about it. A couple months ago, just they popped up as somebody shared it. And I thought that looks interesting. And I'd read this New York Times article about it as well. And then when you brought it up, I thought, oh no, what has happened? So I encountered this through a book called Breath, The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor.

Yeah, he reads books too, ladies. And so inclined other people, I'm not limiting myself. Anyone can idolize me. And you can limit yourself to me, your wife, if you'd like. Done. So this has been a big bestseller, sold a bunch of copies. And it's basically about, I don't know, it's like we're all breathing wrong and there's not much to do about it. It's basically if I shrunk it down to like actionable advice, just the tidbits, it would be don't breathe through your mouth. You should breathe through your nose.

But so there's a section of the book about muing, which is basically like one of the many ways that he explored to like help facilitate breathing through your nose and just breathing better overall. Yeah. Before I get into what that is, would you enlighten me? What does he think? Like what was you read the me? What does he think? Like what was, you read the book?

What was his take on it? Oh, there's, I mean, he learned from the creator of the thing, I believe, so like whatever the... John, Mew. Did he feel that it was beneficial? Did he argue that it was a good idea? Like did he have an opinion on it? It's a weird thing about that book is like,

he encounters a lot of different like, breath activities, but doesn't pass a whole lot of judgment on them is just sort of more of a pop-size sort of sort of thing. It's not like, I think he stopped sort of being like, and you should do it today, you know what I mean? I gotcha. He does have his own experiential stuff in the book about like, things he did and how it went for him,

but he's not really pushing anything. Now you didn't try muing as a result of this. You tried mouth taping. I tried mouth taping once. I didn't really get it. I know you're supposed to stick with it for a while, but it was a bridge too far. If you want to talk about mouth taping at some point, I don't know. I would be willing to do the human guinea pig experiments

on mouth taping. I didn't focus on mouth taping. I focused on viewing for this episode, but it's interesting, because I think the idea of mouth taping real quick, because we're just saying mouth taping, like it's like this. Like mouth taping is this practice,

which has become somewhat fashionable, I think. Yes, I would say that's true. Of putting a small piece of tape on your mouth. And it's like made for this. Like you can buy these strips. You can also just use, from what I've heard, you can use like surgical tape and... Yeah, well you want to use something

that's not going to hurt you. Exactly, and somebody you can leave one and just get in for a long time, it's not going to irritate you. But anyway, basically taping your mouth closed, not like completely, but taping your mouth closed enough so that you will breathe through your nose while you sleep. Yes. Basically.

On the basis that nasal breathing is healthier than mouth breathing is the kind of the theory there. And I will say I'm not going to come out and recommend that because it makes me, it made me so nervous for you to have your mouth taped. Yeah. I was so worry about you. I didn't do it more than one night. I couldn't stand another night of you leaning up on, probably on one elbow just staring at me while I slept. Well, the mirror under your nose.

Yeah. It made me so nervous, and I know that that is hypervigilance, but I was still nervous about it. The reason all of this concern me is the article that I read was titled, How Too British Ortha Dontas Became Celebrities to In Cells. And then you told me you were into muing and I got, or not, okay. You know, it's a fun story, doesn't it, everybody?

My husband's into this fun in cell thing, but I was not into muing. I just mentioned this book that I was reading. But it freaked me out, because I was like, what are you, where, what corners of the internet have you found during this pandemic? So.

Oh, I've found some corners of the internet during this pandemic if you wanna get into those. But no, that muing was not one of them. I think so, of course, there's a lot you could talk about in this space. There's the whole concept of nasal breathing, verse, mouth breathing, and there are all these different things that have been spawned from this idea. I just want to focus on where the word muring comes from in terms of the guy who made it up and kind of what that idea is and where that's taken us.

Because I think that it is sort of the catalyst for a lot of what is happening right now, for a lot of the interest and why this is so trendy and invoked is this guy and his son and their stuff. And I'm not saying there's no other science around it that other people might be doing or this might be built upon, but this seems to be where the current interest is coming from.

So the name Mewing is, it was not actually invented by the creator John Mew. That is where the word comes from, but he didn't call it Mewing. That would come later. He is an orthodontist and later people would call these things that he called orthotropics. He would, they would call it muing. All of this starts with sort of a disagreement about why teeth are sometimes crooked. Okay? So, in traditional orthodontics, our idea as to like, why were my teeth so crooked when I was younger, but yours weren't. Correct.

Our traditional orthodontics says it's just a genetic thing. And there are lots of theories about this, by the way. I'll get into that a little more at the end, but there are lots of different theories as to why are my teeth just crooked. Is it just my genes or is there something else going on? Is it the muscles or the bones or a cartilage thing or is it the soft tissue? Like where does the, what's the chicken, what's the egg?

Where does it all start? One of the theories presented in that book is that a big part of it is that we soft foods. Okay. As a society, industrial, you're getting into John Mu. Yeah. This is Mu stuff.

This probably comes from his work. There is a Northodontist that kind of just to get into like what, what I'm going to tell you, John Mu has argued is probably built a little bit on one of like the fathers of orthodontics who kind of came up with this functional matrix theory about like the soft tissues, influence the way that our teeth grow in and that that's where all of that comes from. And it probably wasn't all coming just from John Mu, like he was building on other things, but like the current stuff is very much John Mu. And that's what that's kind of what he said.

He said, so everybody thinks that our teeth are crooked because of genes. And so the way that you fix the teeth is you just straighten the teeth. And that's what orthodontics does a lot of the time. I mean, that was my experience with my orthodontist was my teeth were crooked. They were crooked my whole life. Straight the teeth. So they were straight. I had braces and then I had a retainer

Of course they can remove teeth if there's too much crowding, you know that can be part of it There are other surgeries that can be done But generally that's you just fix it Mew proposed orthotropics as an alternative view to that Basically teeth are not the problem Teeth are not the problem teeth are not the problem. Teeth are not the problem. Teeth are doing the right thing. So fixing the teeth doesn't fix the problem because the problem isn't the teeth. The problem is your jaw.

And his idea was that throughout history, humans have been developing sort of longer, narrower faces with smaller recessed jaws. And that this is why our teeth are growing in crooked is because the jaw is wrong. We are supposed to have more like horizontal broad growth of the jaw. And instead it's growing more vertical. Does that make sense? A lot of it comes with, he says we're we're we're always focused on the jaw in terms of your mandible. That's the lower part of your jaw. That he says we're, we're, we're, we always focus on the jaw in terms of your mandible. That's the lower part of your jaw. That's like you're the, the part you're opening and closing when you're talking or eating or whatever.

He says we need to focus more on the maxilla. That's the upper part of your jaw, which his view is that the maxilla guides what the mandible is going to do as we're forming, as we're growing, especially as a child. So if the maxilla is not growing forward enough and wide enough, then our mandible will have to grow back and down to compensate and meet it. And the result is that there isn't enough space in our mouths for our teeth, so our teeth get crowded. And also a lot of stuff about the way we look will result from this. So this isn't just about teeth.

Like he started with this concern about teeth, but for John Mu and later we'll talk about his son, Mike Mu, it very much has grown into an aesthetic issue. He believes this is why if you look at human faces today, generally, and this is not everybody, but generally his argument is, we are more likely to have small recessed chins, less prominent cheekbones, which can result in more of a sunken appearance of our eyes. He says that makes our noses grow longer and downward having more of a hooked appearance. And that all of this has to do with our jaws developing incorrectly. Well, I think that's wild.

I don't know the science, but I will say that if you look at pictures of old timing people, you look at pictures today. There's no comparison. People today are beautiful and sexy and powerful. And if you look at all the time, people that look like they're made out of hateful play-doh. People are sexier now than they ever have been. So I'm going to discount this theory out of hand.

You think so? Oh, yeah. I mean, I don't really have a strong opinion on any of that. Give me any 2020 person from the population. I would take them over, I would bet the top 5% of 1900s earth, 1900 period, not 1900s, because that gets into like 99 and then you're entering like Alicia Silverstone, Brad Pitt after peak territory and that's insane. What you're getting into though is like cultural ideals of beauty.

You like things that are beautiful now because you live in the culture that is now. If you lived 200 years ago. Thank you for saying that Sydney. Yes, that is a big part of me is like, I am, this is, I'm now. I'm not living in the past with Brad and Elisia. And now our culture changes. It goes back and forth in their waves. They're probably times throughout human history

where you would be just as attracted to the human ideal of beauty then, as you are now, because it was more similar. Pretty sure not, but they dress pretty bad. A lot of them, and they- Not always. As attractive as we are today. We're at our peak, as well I'm saying,

no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. John Mew didn't think, doesn't think so, didn't and still doesn't. And he thought- So John Mew's looking at all time people and he's like, yes, I like it. Yes. And especially skulls. I mean, a lot of this gets into like looking at ancient skulls and looking at the skulls today and saying like, look at the difference.

Tell me if I'm wrong, but like, he is not the only one doing this research. This is like what he is based on the practices off of. There's a lot of like anthropology, I don't know, skull people, skull doctors. Yes, no you're not. Dutting the changes over time. This is a thing that is happening. Yes, there are a lot of anthropologists who have kind of observed what he's talking about.

And like I said, he is not, so Melvin Moss was an orthodontist who was a first one to kind of come up with this idea that it's called the functional matrix theory. And it is this concept of the development of the face that like just like our skull develops in part because of our brain, which so like soft tissues influencing hard structures like bone, that it's the same idea with our face. And so it's not as simple as the teeth just grew in crooked. It's what happened to the face that influenced the growth of the face in that direction. Okay, first off, melvin moss sounds like the alter ego

of a Superman villain, like Dr. Lincoln or something. By day, he's melvin moss, researcher, by night, he's Dr. Lincoln or something by day he's milven moss researcher by night. He's Dr. Lincoln. Well, and I mean, he is like as far as I can tell and dentistry and orthodontics. These are not my areas of expertise as we've talked about many time to the show. You have a real disdain for that. No, I don't. I just don't know. I already think about them. But it seems to me that like this theory that he came up with was not, I mean, that it is not in and of itself the problem. Like, this is, we still have a lot to understand about why the face grows and forms the way that it does.

This is still an evolving area in orthodontics. So all of these theories that have been put forth and you can read about them, there are a lot of different theories as to how all this development occurs and what happens first and everything. But none of that is wild. I think what I'm focusing on is that in that space, John Mu, and then, as we'll talk about his son, Mike, have taken it to a whole other place. That is kind of what I'm saying.

So anyway, what Mu says is that we don't need to fix the teeth. All this stuff, and he's very vocal about that. He's gotten in trouble for this. He's very vocal that all the stuff that orthodontists do is basically ball, and you shouldn't do it. Because it doesn't work, and it doesn't fix the problem, and they're ignoring the real problem, which is we have to fix the growth of the face. And you can do this with certain postures and positioning of the face and tongue and some appliances that he has created for this job.

But it really, his focus from when he started doing his work was on children. Like this has to be done while your face and jaw is still developing. Not something that you do after the fact. So what are we do? I mean, I can't believe you're telling me this when I could be upstairs with our children

shaping these behaviors. Just give me the, what can I do to have beautiful children? Well, I'm gonna get to that. And you're kidding me. You're gonna make me do it as first. First, let's go to the building department. Let's go. Let's go.

Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. The medicines, the medicines that ask you let my car before the mouth. Welcome. Thank you, Paul. Thank you. These are real podcast listeners, not actors.

What do you look for in a podcast? Reliability is big for me, power. I'd say comfort. What do you think of this? Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!

That's Jordan Jesse Go! Jordan Jesse Go! They came out of the floor. And down from the ceiling? That can't be safe. I'm upset. Can we go down? Soon.

Jordan Jesse Go. A real podcast. Please, Sydney, help me have attractive kids. Okay. I'm not doing anything right now in this department. I'm feeling like a real negligent father. Well, I think our children are perfect exactly the way they are. Well, let me hear what you have to say first.

I love them. The side. I love their chins and noses. Their faces are precisely the way they are. Their faces are so narrow, aren't they? I've thought that you've thought it too. I have never. I have never.

I have never. I've never got to fix it. The things that John Mew focuses on in terms of facial beauty, I don't think are things I at least on a conscious level have considered. Like, ooh, that's a wide face. I don't think these are things that my brain has consciously ever thought. Sydney just likes a thick booty.

She doesn't even get to the face. You should see my wife. It doesn't matter. Boy, girl, person outside the gender binary, if there's a thick butt, Sydney's like, yes. This is not a focus of our office. A slice. Okay, as you alluded to, you look, you're all flimics thinking about thick butts.

You're, you're so off track. As you alluded to, John, John, you believed that the problem started with the industrial revolution. Right. We started eating soft food. He thought that was one of the first problems. Right. So when we chew soft food, we are not using our muscles of massacation as well. And so our jaws are underdeveloped. So he thought that was part of the

problem. The other problem is that our noses got stuffy. Right. Making it harder to breathe through your nose. Why did that happen? Pollution is the big answer. People moved to cities, the air quality was bad. People got allergies and stuff and they stopped being able to breathe through their nose as comfortably so they started breathing through their mouth. So you have this combination of kind of his heat

describes people walking around with their mouths hanging open and you can tell there's disdain for this. True, true. I'm like this. This is not his invention though. Think about how often you've heard mouthbreeder, breather, or all this a pejorative, like it's not something invented. No, no, but you can, but you can tell that a lot of this comes from that and you'll see how it develops into the, some of the unfortunate pathways

this line of thinking has taken us into a bunch of like kind of weak people sitting behind computers with their mouths hanging open staring at screens all day. And I guess eating pudding or mashed potatoes or something. Yeah. Which is really kind of what John Mu feels like the human race is becoming and is very upset about. Instead of like big chew and big live and wide face heroes. Yes. Who are athletic and dominant and out there eating hard foods and breathing through their nose. Right.

And so what you said you could do. I bet that 120 so the ours guy was doing that and look how that turned out cautionary tale about eating hard foods and living your best life. So the result, so what you said you could do is that you need to get your kids to eat hard food. And by hard, I literally mean like not soft food, hard food. I don't mean like challenging flavors, I mean hard.

Right, okay. And keep their mouth shut. Hey, on that one, John, you and I agree. I love to encourage our children to talk as much as they can. I did. That is clear by the way. I didn't hear the reggae. No, I heard it.

I heard it. And that is also very, I think, evident that both of us encouraged that in our children in that they talk all the time. I love that. But they do. And they love to tell stories. So, me, you started trying out these ideas just like any good scientist would on his own children.

Now, listen, you have extolled that behavior in some of our previous subjects, and don't turn around and try to flip it now. Okay. No, I need you to listen to this. So I stole this paragraph from the New York Times piece that I read by William Brennan, because I really think that it sums up better than I could paraphrase what John said.

And this was an interview with him, this piece. So this is what he said. He did with his children to try to test his theories, okay? His first son, Bill, did poorly. He suffered from severe allergies and had so much trouble keeping his mouth shut that John resorted to hypnosis. Though Bill disputes this, John says he created a headband with a spike that poked his son's chin anytime he parted his lips. His third child, Rosie, was put through an opposite experiment. Curious about the effects of a soft diet on facial growth, John instructed his wife to serve her pure-aid foods in a bottle until she was four years old.

I had teeth growing one in front of the other, Rosie told me. I was a really, really ugly little kid. It was the middle child, Mike, who became John's orthotropic masterpiece, the success evident as they set side by side on the edge of the lake at the castle. John lives in a castle now, by the way. Where John's face is thin and oblong, Mike's is wide and short. His chewing muscles so large that you can see them flex. So Mike Mu was the success.

And if you want to look up pictures of Mike Mu, he does have a wide, broad, well-defined jawline. I would agree. I would agree. I would agree. Wow, look at this guy. That doesn't look real. His jaw is insane. What a jaw.

I did not look up pictures of his other children that seemed obscene in some way. I just didn't like any of that. How do they spell? How do they spell Rosie? Yeah, how do they spell Rosie? Mike is part of the family business now. So when you look up articles and read about John,

you often will find Mike. Throughout the 80s, after Mew did these experiments, he started trying to like go the conventional route to promote his theories. He tried to publish in the British Dental Journal, but they were basically like, this is ridiculous. No.

He would later publish his own book, which on the cover of his first self-published book about his theories of orthotropics, he put Eper C Moiv, Moiv, it's what Galileo said, and yet it moves, which I only know, because I watch West Wing, but that's what Galileo said after he was found guilty on trial, he was like still defiant, and yet it moves.

So this guy feels that way. If this just gives you some insight into who John is, which again, like if you read this piece, it's very evident. The guy lives in a castle that is one, like he built the castle himself and then has won awards for what an amazing castle He built all right, and I mean he has a history like to get into it

This is a guy who was extremely successful in like Rowan I think he had a career in crew. Oh, you lose like there. Formula one race car You talk about he was like an athletic accomplished guy before the orthodontic. I hear anybody here. If anybody's life story at any point Listeners, please tell me if you're in the same boat. I don't know. I say it out loud when I am reading anybody's story and Water conveyance becomes a part of their story I am immediately can no longer identify with this person. Do you, you're laughing? Do you know what I mean?

If there's like yachting, boating, kayaking, crew, you name it. If somebody is like in their biography and it's like, and then you got into boat stuff, I'm like, ah, this is okay, you've left me behind. I don't understand that. I mean, he lives in a very nice castle now, so. Okay, castle stuff. He's in a different strata of society than we are.

I might get to the castle at some point. Who knows, life goes in funny directions. There is no way, or it's like, and then in his mid-40s, just in God into crow. Like, it's just, Well, he did all this before the orthodontist stuff. Like, he was, my point is like, he was a driven successful guy,

his whole life. All right, great. Good. That's all I'm saying. Yeah. With at least one beautiful child. At least one. I can't see if found the others, but Mike Mews has got a jaw and a cut glass.

If that's the kind of jaw you like that Mike Mews got it. No arguments here. That's what it says on this business card. And that really, it's interesting. If you get into John Mu will happily tell you the reason that part of this, the reason this was so important to him is that when he was younger, somebody referred to him as like the kid with a very long face.

And so it was a problem for him. Like he felt that his whole life. He was the first person where somebody is like, why the long face? He was the first person in history to be like, face. And so it was a problem for him. Like he felt that his whole life. He was the first person where somebody's like, why the long face? He was the first person in history to be like, huh, I don't. That's a good question. I don't know. I want to find out. I'm going to research it. Let me figure it out. So while his ideas were really not accepted by the mainstream and like orthodontist just said, this is, okay, well, this is nothing.

Mew continued to practice and perfect his techniques in his clinic in London. And he had his own like school for orthotropics that was basically like the conference room in the clinic where he worked. And people could come learn from him and there were, there are people. There are people in orthodontics who have like followed in his footsteps and who have embraced his theories and who believe in this and practice it other places throughout the world. But largely it was kind of his,

he was doing his thing there at his office. He would use like things to expand your palate further like to make your max a little wider. He developed something called a bio block which is like a device. It looks like a retainer. If you look, at first that's what I thought it was. I was looking at pictures of it online

and I was like, is it just a retainer? Like, I had one of those. But it actually, so it kind of brackets your teeth apart. But then it has this like spiky part, I guess, that if you leave your mouth hanging open, it will kind of hurt you. Like it will hurt your gums. So it's a way to both keep your mouth in position

and prevent you from letting your mouth hang up. Like negative reinforcement kind of thing. It also has like a heat sensor now where it can collect data so your orthodontist will know if you were wearing it or not. So you can't lie. Which I have found in anybody who ever had a retainer knows the same thing. You can't lie anyway. I never wore my retainer and as soon as I went to my orthodontist, they were like, you're not wearing your retainer, are you?

And I'm like, sure, I am. And they're like, it doesn't fit in your mouth anymore. I'm like, whoa, that's weird. It's weird to think you're disdain for that field had already begun at that age, Sydney. That is a weird origin. Did you ever have to wear a retainer? Look at these teeth.

They're no fun. Look at these teeth. Do these teeth look like teeth have been touched by science? retainer? Look at these teeth. They're no fun. Look at these teeth. Do these teeth look like teeth have been touched by science? Now, these are major states. You know what, sad my teeth were touched by science, but you wouldn't know by looking at them. You know what? But you know the only thing that's kept me in line is I love to crunch.

You know, I mean, I saw foods need to apply. And so, and then he would also train them with the hard food and the keep your mouth shut. And like, this is where the technique that has been called mowing where basically this is quite a build-up to this technique by the way folks You're gonna be disappointed. It is So you can do this as you're listening if you open your mouth You're not driving you will find that your tongue naturally sits in the floor of your mouth, right? It's just there. That's where it's hanging out. But you can move it. What John Mew wants you to do is keep your mouth shut, keep your lips together, your teeth together, and press your tongue up into the roof of your mouth. That is meowing. And do that as much as you can.

For a friend. And just do that all the time. Like, unless you're talking or eating, you should be doing it. And actually, there are techniques for like the way you should swallow so that you can still keep your tongue and your teeth in appropriate positions after you've put, obviously, you have to open your mouth, put the food in. But you know what I mean? Like, it gets more advanced in this, but this is the general idea.

Your tongue needs to rest in the roof of your mouth and on the floor of your mouth, you're doing it right now, I can tell. It's kind of like, I was about to say smizing with your mouth, but that would just be smiling. But this is something that you need to train your children to do specifically, so that their faces develop the way they're supposed to. And that was his focus. You finished the Okay, I'll look to start doing that.

You finish the episode, I'll go tell it to teach our kids. That was his focus was on children. That's really important to what it's become because what he really said was once you're an adult, it's just too late. You gotta get them when they're young to start practicing these things. And then that's how you develop these beautiful, in his opinion, faces as you get older. So like I said, traditional orthodontist think that this is bunk and just said, okay, well he's going to do his weird thing over there, that's fine.

We'll keep putting on braces and straightening teeth and doing our usual stuff. But it's taken off and this is probably because of Mike. So according to the article, Mike was sort of like doing dentistry and also partying a lot and then decided to like settle down and work with his dad and his clinic after a while. So he went back to his dad's office and he saw what his dad was teaching and he was like, you know, you could really make this more popular if you used social media essentially. And like all the different ways we can spread these ideas now that you didn't have back, you know, in 1981 when you first tried to get published. So he started making these YouTube videos where he could spread the word of orthotropics and explain the techniques. And he was pretty good at SEO, so his videos got some prominence.

Like especially now, he'll tie in different things to celebrity faces. If you want to know why this person's face looks like that, here are some things you can do. He's really good at that world. You can tell Mike has skills when it comes to how can I use... Building a brand. Yeah, these tools to do this. 2021, you don't have the luxury not to be a brand.

So what started with a really local business, now they have people flying in clients from all over the world, like flying even their children in to come see them at this clinic and get like have these techniques done so that their kids will be more beautiful as they get older. So it really exploded after that.

This is led into a couple of different directions. The one that I think you stumbled on is really the idea of what we're really talking about is mouth versus nose breathing as the core of that. That is one piece of it. What John Mu said very clearly is nasal breathing is superior to mouth breathing. And if you keep your mouth shut, you have to breathe through your nose. So that's where that ties in.

And then his leads back to this beauty ideal, this aesthetic piece. But what it is also branched into is a lot of people saying you need to do these techniques to fight snoring, to fight sleep apnea, general sleep disturbances that you might, you know, just pour sleep, restless sleep, that kind of thing. And then even into things like COPD or asthma or other chronic lung diseases can be fixed

by keeping your mouth shut and breathing through your nose. Is the general idea there? The thought is that then if you do this, you will open your airways more, if your mouth is closed and your tongue is in the roof of your mouth, you have more space in the back to breathe easier. And it's hard because like what they're hitting at here is that is nasal breathing better than mouth breathing

at night? Well, I mean, just based on the fact that most humans breathe through their nose, not all, but most do at night, probably yes. I mean, right based on the fact that most humans breathe through their nose, not all, but most do at night, probably yes. I mean, right, that's more efficient. That's why more people do it. That's also, it warms the air more. Yes, there is more warm, moist air,

so you do not dry out structures as much when you breathe through your nose. So can we start it on the sillier in there? And it is better for like dental health and oral health for sure. There's also as Justin had mentioned to me, this concept of dehydration that can occur from breathing through your mouth because it is drier. And it can dry out your gums and it can, you know, it can lead to, it can add to things

like dental caries and gum disease and things like that. I'm not saying it is the only causative factor. But yes, it is not as good as nose breathing. I would agree with that statement, and there's some science out there that would back up these things. When it comes to things like asthma and COPD, the evidence gets pretty scant at that point

that like you're going to make a giant difference in a chronic lung disease by breathing through your nose over your mouth. It probably is helpful in a lot of ways, but it might not be the linchpin to health and well-being. Does that make sense? But I think that's one direction that this has led to. The other is what I said at the beginning of the show,

this adoption by the in-cell community. Yes. Speak on that. Because this was so tied to this idea that facial beauty, especially like this, I think this sort of masculine beauty ideal that he was unintentionally invoking with this sort of broad, you know, prominent jaw line, which I really think a lot of people

tied to this alpha male masculine thing. Mike was invited to speak at a 21 convention. I guess that's a sort of man's, it's not men's rights, but like male power, kind of celebration of men, kind of thing. I said it was part of the what was called the manosphere. The manosphere. And he came to speak about it not and he claims not really knowing what he was there to talk about. I guess it's the help men be men in whatever that means to them, to these people specifically. And and that added to its validity because he went and spoke there.

And these practices have really been embraced by a lot of what we would think of as the in-cell parts of the internet, the in-cell community, that claims there are a lot of factors in modern life that are stealing min's ability to attract women, assuming you are a man who wants to attract a woman, and that it is not necessarily you, but all of our life that has made you suffer in this way. And that you can reclaim that, at least the facial beauty part of it, through different techniques to looks max. Looks max.

Looks maxing, that's all one word. Okay. So you got to looks max, and one thing you can do to looks max, which I think is really calling to this, like, their concept of masculinity is muting, because then you can fix your weak chin, and make yourself look.

Max, Max. Like you have a big jaw, which is important. You know what they say about people with big teeth. And so that really took off after that. So if you start digging into this, you'll drift into these areas. Like this is definitely where the internet could take you if you really look into muing.

And that is where the term muing came from, by the way, from that community. That is when the the words started to be used instead of orthotropics. And so anyway, John and Mike continue to spread. There's practices via the internet. John lost his license to practice from the General Dental Council in 2017. In a large part, not so much due to what he's doing because the idea of telling people to breathe through your nose and keep your tongue in the roof of your mouth is not inherently dangerous, right? Like a lot of things that we've talked about, it is extremely unlikely that there would be sufficient research on some of this because there's zero money.

Exactly. I guess you could look into the bio block, like that device that he made. But generally speaking, I think the bigger problem is that they are continuing to be not, maybe not so much since 2017, but outspoken critics of traditional orthodontics. And that was really where they got in trouble,

is like they were publishing things, like flyers and things saying like, basically your orthodontist is lying to you and you can't do that. So that's why I got in trouble. As an interesting addendum to all of this, it is true that we still have more to learn when it comes to how do our faces develop, the jaw and the teeth and everything. There are still things we're learning and trying to understand.

So this isn't like everyone knows exactly all this is true and John Mu is flying in the face of it. There's some gray area where we're still trying to figure things out, which I think really allows theories like this to flourish because if you know the science you know there's a limit to what you can answer. Well some of us don't have the luxury of weights any service or in our 40s and need widefaces now. In addition to that there is a large percentage of people who go through like a traditional orthodontic kind of course and have maybe braces or retainers or whatever who do experience sort of a I guess a relapse would be the word, their teeth get crooked again.

There are a lot of people who experience that, which does lead to the question, which they ask in a very aggressive way, and I think you could also ask in a very curious scientific way, which is, is there something we're missing? Is there a way that if you so desire to have your teeth straightened, we could do it without them going back. Is there another piece to the puzzle, which I think is always a good question to ask, right? You got to ask questions, but that fact is really what you kind of hangs a lot on and why he got in trouble for criticizing orthodontists.

There's also, as you said, if you talk to anthropologists, which the author of that article did and you can read about, if you look at skulls from thousands of years ago, they do tend to have perfectly straight teeth and broader jaws. Whereas about 200 years ago, we start to see skulls with more narrow jaws and crooked teeth. So it does seem like humans changed in terms of their development. Now why do we evolve one way or over another? I mean, there's so many pressures for that. Like it's not as simple as, well, everyone ate soft food one day and then our jaws got

narrow. I mean, I think that that's a bad, like that's a very simplistic view of it. There's obviously more going on, but there is, I mean, there is, it is an interesting question. Why does it appear our ancestors had straight teeth and we don't?

I don't know the answer to that. Like I said, I do think that there is some truth to the nose breathing being superior to mouth breathing. Again, if for no other reason, then the default of most humans is to breathe through their nose at night. But when it comes to things like dehydration, I don't know, maybe like yes, snoring for sure can be affected by mouth breathing, sleep apnea, things like sports or asthma or COPD, they've studied those and seen no clear difference, like whether you're breathing through your mouth or your nose.

Does it change the shape of your face? Really? Really? Like all these techniques he's saying for kids to do. Does it change the shape of your face? Does it work? I don't know. There have been some small studies that say possibly, but the problem is it's really hard

to define mouth breathing. So it's really easy to kind of toss subjects in or out as you want to because so much of it is self-report. So much of what you're relying on is people to be 100, you can't observe them. Do you know what I'm saying? So it's a really difficult study to do. And even John Mu himself has said, like, well, I put up pictures of my successes,

but I don't put up pictures of all my patients because you would see the ones that it didn't work on and you would say, see, it doesn't work. So I just don't put them up, which is kind of the whole problem, right? So it seems like there's a lot of this stuff circles back to Mu, a lot of this interest. There are people doing research in this area

for sure, but a lot of them reference mew as their inspiration initially. So it all kind of leads back to his stuff. Is it fair to say like we maybe he's right? I think there might be aspects, yes, that are true, but I do also think that if your focus is on restoring the perfect facial beauty of the human species, that's a really hard to tell. It's a tough target, Dan. Well, I mean, that's incredibly subjective. And like he has a picture, I guess, you can look at of what he considers like the perfect beautiful face.

Okay, let me give it a go. It's, wait a minute. It's me. Thank you John Mu, I appreciate it. I think it's like anything. There's still more we have to learn about all aspects of medical science. Why would things with orthodontics not be part of that?

Certainly, there's probably more we have to learn. And is there a way to routinely have people's, breathe through their nose more at night? I would say a big focus would be on why do we all have such stuffy noses? Maybe we get back to air quality, like playing off our episode from last week. But obviously there's there's stuff to look into there. I think that these are areas of research. I think what you're getting into trouble is if you start making definitive statements so that people will come see you because you say you have all the answers. And that would be the area where maybe this starts to drift into trouble.

Also, John Mu initially said this only works on kids. He was very clear on that. Nowadays, the general idea from John and Mike Mu is, well, maybe it could work on adults. They seem really interested. Why not? Maybe we'll treat adults too. Well, just for science, just for science sake, maybe we'll treat adults.

But if you see somebody in a YouTube video telling you that they've been muing for two days and they can already see a difference, I would regard that with a lot of skepticism. And I would also wonder if they didn't just have a nice broad jaw to begin with. Folks, thank you so much for listening to our podcast. We hope you have enjoyed yourself. Thanks to the Max Fun Network for having us as part of their extended podcasting family.

Thanks to the taxpayers for the use of their song medicines as the intro and outro of our program. Hey, listen, you want a book? We got a paperback version of Solbun's book came out at the end of last year and it's got lots of new content. It's called Solbun's book, Illustrations by Cindy Sibling Taylor, and it's available wherever fine books are sold. So.

I really think you'll like the new stuff too. There's new stuff. That is gonna do it for us this week's episode. So until next time, my name is Justin McRoy. I'm Sydney McRoy. And as always, don't drill a hole in your head. Alright!