Elective Amputations

Voluntarily amputating a part of your body does not seem to be a good idea. You would not entertain the idea that you are better off with only one leg, even if there might be some advantages.

Those advantages could be, for example, that you would only need to buy one shoe and that pedicures would be about half price.

But let’s get back to reason, as certainly, I was not serious. No sane person would elect to amputate a part of the body if it would not be absolutely necessary for a medical reason.

Unfortunately, this is not quite true. Many of us submit to elective amputations and even subject their children to it.

The only reason we are not in arms about this is the choice of vocabulary. We call it extraction — and yes — I am talking about teeth.

Just with legs and arms, there could be a medical reason for extraction — or amputation. A tooth could be so severely damaged, that any attempt to repair it would be futile; or it could be infected so that it poisons the rest of the body and the cause of the infection needs to be removed to give the body a chance to heal.

But every day perfectly healthy teeth are amputated in order to “make space.”

On first look, it seems to make sense. Let’s take a young child who’s teeth are erupting crooked. There just is not enough space in the jaw for all the teeth, so the dentist or orthodontist, only trained to fix a symptom, reaches for the most obvious solution and extracts a few molars and then uses braces to nudge the other teeth into the now empty space.

Dentists, however, who are trained to look at the whole picture, would also realize that the jaw is too small to accommodate all teeth, but would not come to the conclusion to reduce the number of teeth, but instead to expand the jaw.

The holistic dentist, the one who is trained to see the patient as a whole person and not as a set of teeth, easily accomplished this by early intervention therapy and jaw orthopedics. Special consideration is given to achieve and promote an enlarged airway, a healthy jaw joint, a fully developed, wide smile, and a pleasing facial profile with proper lip support.

The guiding principle in holistic dentistry — “First do no harm!” — implies that extracting perfectly healthy teeth in order to ‘create space’ in a jaw that is not big enough to accommodate all teeth, is a biological mistake. If jaw orthopedics is initiated precisely in the period during which the jaws are still developing (ages 5–11), this notion becomes obsolete. The trick is to MAKE space early, not to amputate later.

Let us take a look at a situation in the real world.

This little girl started out with a lower jaw that was too small. At this age, this might have been considered cute, but as a young adult, that smaller jaw would have taken away from a pleasing profile.

A few years later we see that the lower jaw has already been developed to look more energetic with the promise of a beautiful profile.

At the end of her treatment our — now — young lady exhibits facial harmony, a beautiful profile, self-esteem, and determination, that would never be possible with an underdeveloped chin.

There are growth centers in the jawbones which direct jaw growth in three fundamental dimensions: a slightly downward direction, responsible for vertical development of the jaws; a forward direction to help develop a pleasing profile; and a horizontal direction which aids lateral development.

Our genes determine the functioning of those growth centers. If any of those developments is disturbed, we can aid the jaw development with movable or fixed appliances to nudge those growth centers.

Strategies

The first sign that the jaw development of a child is not progressing optimally, are crowded teeth, a crossbite or similar manifestations. Traditionally, to handle the situation, braces were used, possibly after extracting perfectly good teeth (the above mentioned elective amputation) to create space.

Now we understand that these signs are just symptoms and that we have to handle the underlying dysfunction first. This is done with early intervention during the maximum growth phase of a child during the ages of 5 (6) to 10 (latest 11).

At age 10 we might have missed the early jaw orthopedics phase, as eighty percent of jaw growth has already occurred. During this time most of the primary teeth are either loose or already lost, which makes the application of removable appliances very difficult. If this early phase is missed, braces will probably take longer.

It is sometimes difficult to break a Mode of Operandi we were not really educated to question, but once we do investigate the subject more deeply, it becomes obvious that our view of the subject was incorrect and need to be overthrown or at least corrected.

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