Sunday, July 19, 2020

Medicine: Orthodontics/dentistry major flawed premise resulting in flawed medical practices

I'm watching a podcast interview with an orthodontist (Mike Mew) that has some interesting views about his field (he says he's the only one in the field with these views).

He says that the standard view is that crooked teeth and various other problems are caused by bad genes. He said that when he was studying this stuff, nobody else was seeking explanations about why these mouth problems occur. 

He says that that view ignores evolution. He says that such bad genes would not have evolved.

The interviewer Bret Weinstein mentioned that he now has a condition called root resorption. He said that his orthodontist's solution was to remove 5 teeth. He said that this condition is most common with people who had braces decades earlier. Mike explained his theory about why this condition occurs.

Mike says that we have these problems because we changed our diets, as compared to the diets of our ancestors. We used to eat tough foods and now we eat soft foods. Our jaws acclimate to their environment (my paraphrase). So we are molding our jaws by our actions.

I've noticed the same acclimating phenomenon in many other areas of our bodies. Here's a few:
  • I think the first time was in university when I studied CO2 exhalation of mice in a low oxygen environment. We were trying to make an experiment that paralleled the situation where somebody spent some time in high altitude (where there is less oxygen available to breath in). I learned that when we change our environment to a low oxygen one, our bodies change to account for it. Our bodies make more hemoglobin, for example. The hemoglobin molecule works to take oxygen out of solution, binding the oxygen to itself, allowing more oxygen to be carried by the blood.
  • I learned that power lifting (and similar things) causes one's muscles, tendons, ligaments, bones to get stronger. 
  • I learned about the phenomenon of building a tolerance to chemicals, like alcohol. I think that's a type of acclimation. 
  • I recently learned about somebody claiming that we can fix myopia with exercises. I don't have the link at the moment and I didn't look into it. 
  • I learned a few days ago (from this podcast) about a theory that says that the internal structure of our nasal passages change depending on how we breath. So mouth breathers have a different nasal passage structure than compared if they had been nose breathing. And the theory is that you can change your nasal passage structure now, by doing certain nose breathing exercises.

Other things Mike said that I found interesting:
  • In medicine, the common thing to do is ignore outliers as random events. He said we should not ignore outliers because we can learn something from those cases.
  • Mike knows Karl Popper. Mike paraphrased Popper as saying "you can't prove anything. you can only disprove things." He said that Popper talked about "the null hypothesis". He said that when you do a scientific paper, you try to disprove (falsify) the null hypothesis. He said that the medical field forgot about why we have the null hypothesis. Bret added that experts in the medical field skipped the philosophy of science and told themselves lies about why it's no longer necessary to learn the philosophy of science and that they've got more sophisticated methods. 
  • Orthodontists are trying to strip him of his license to practice orthodontics using like a court of orthodontists where he has a prosecutor expert and a defense expert, both of which are against his views. 

There's tons more interesting things in the podcast.

1 comment:

  1. An interesting related idea is that preventative medicine is not as profitable as non-preventative medicine.

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