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by Nesco 1241 days ago
”Mewing” is just normal tongue posture. It will not improve your jawline. Usually it’s the reverse: if you need to “mew” / put your tongue on the roof of your mouth consciously and if you naturally snores it’s because of a problem.

Problem that is often genetic or more rarely that appeared during your development: either your face lacks forward projection or a part only is recessed (malocclusion: your upper and lower teeth don’t perfectly fit).

The only way to definitively cure it is to go through an orthognatic surgery. If not treated it might evolves into sleep apnea as you are getting older. You should check with an orthodontist or a maxillo-facial surgeon to make sure that’s what your are suffering from.

If your are lucky like me, ie you have enough projection and no malocclusion, a genioplasty might be sufficient to naturally seal your lips without muscle contraction by bringing them closer. In my case it’s what created the pressure differential needed for my tongue to stay in the roof of my mouth. If you are unlucky a BSSO, a Lefort I or both (Bimax) might be necessary. Some extreme cases might even require the three surgeries.

1 comments

While genetic/heritable factors play a role, the evidence is overwhelming that the main cause is weak jaw muscles and improper resting posture during childhood, due to soft diets and allergies.

I'd also like to add that even in absence of sleep apnea, Upper Airway Resistance Syndrome, where the airway collapses but the body partially wakes up before it progresses into an apnea, is likely, and often missed by diagnostics.

In general, maxillomandibular advancement is always more effective than genioglossus advancement during genio.

Thanks for the precision! Bimax indeed best practice but performing BSSO comes with significant risk of nerve damages.

In my (light) case for example two independant surgeons advised me against as the risk outweighed the potential benefice

The risk scales with BSSO distance, surgeon expertise(both quality of work, and especially how long the operation takes).

I wish more research was conducted into improving nerve healing using administration of stuff like Cerebrolysin, other neurotrophic, or cellular stress therapy - e.g. in fat transplantation, pre-op suction promotes vascularization and local growth factor release, dramatically improving fat graft survival rates, in skin/hair, microneedling works wonders through local growth factor release. Could we do the same to the nerves?