The Five Dimensions of a Tongue-tie

A revolution has been occurring and it has some people pretty uncomfortable. In school we learned of ankyloglossia, the pictures showed a tongue that was completely tethered to the floor of the mouth. We were taught that if the patient can talk and eat there’s no reason to “clip it.” At the dawn of time infants who couldn’t nurse because of ankyloglossia were left to perish. Those were brutal times! Since infant formula and bottles are so easy to use and children are nice and round, releasing ties has been relegated to elective surgery discussions. What if that’s wrong? Why is that wrong?

The question of why that’s wrong has been the life work of Dr. Sarouch Zaghi. He is a protege of Dr. Christian Guilleminault, the father of sleep apnea who boldly set out to show that sleep apnea in non-obese children was a function of improper facial growth, led by a lack of tongue mobility. Dr. Guilleminault set Dr. Zaghi onto the missing link in all of the sleep architecture, the tongue. Today we know of new ways to actually measure the mobility of the tongue, when, why, and how to release the tongue, and how important orofacial myofunctional therapy is to all of the sleep, with or without a functional release.

Using validated tools and measurements we’ll work with live people (each other) to assess everyone for a restriction, and show how OMT would approach the case. We’ll see cases and videos of cases that we treated at Primal Air.