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I found this super-interesting, but the article's cliff hanger was left unsatisfactorily unresolved. So skeletal records show that malocclusion wasn't regularl

I found this super-interesting, but the article's cliff hanger was left unsatisfactorily unresolved. So skeletal records show that malocclusion wasn't regularly observed before around the time of the industrial revolution. Why not? I presume that mainstream orthodontics is evidence-based and that these guys are either deluded or charlatans, but on the other hand, they at least had the scientific curiosity to challenge the status quo. I don't buy their conclusion -- and the incel/alt right/whatever weirdness doesn't help -- but how does mainstream dentistry account for the sudden physiological change?

wendyshu 6y ago
So industry, but not agriculture, screwed up people's faces - a puzzle. Pollution? Watery processed e.g. canned foods (as mentioned in the article)? Preservative methods that replaced older foods like hardtack and tough salted meat?
- klipt 6y ago
  https://whyy.org/segments/could-old-skulls-help-us-understand-why-we-have-crooked-teeth/ https://whyy.org/segments/could-old-skulls-help-us-understan... mentions a hypothesized shift from breast feeding to bottle feeding during the industrial revolution.
drcode 6y ago
Dentistry seems like an extremely conservative profession, and one that received very little attention from outsiders. This story definitely makes me wonder if there are still a lot of "low hanging fruit" in dentistry that have been left unexplored. It does seem rather strange that nearly be 100% of parents are told that their kids' mouths are terribly messed up and need expensive procedures. Never are parents offered any convincing scientific explanation for why everyone's mouth seems to go counter to all the usual biological rules of evolutionary adaptation.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > Never are parents offered any convincing scientific explanation for why everyone's mouth seems to go counter to all the usual biological rules of evolutionary adaptation. Dentists (like medical doctors) generally aren't evolutionary biologists, and even if they were that also, we (humanity collectively) know a lot more about function than the evolutionary pressures that produce it. That said, the contribution, the contribution of optimum tooth alignment over a modern lifespan to reproductive fitness is probably very low over most of human evolution.
- klipt 6y ago
  Implant dentistry seems to acknowledge that jawbones atrophy without exposure to bite forces, which is one reason they recommend implants over false teeth. False teeth don't transit enough bite force to the jawbone, which causes atrophy and leads to the recessed chins common in older toothless people.
  - phkahler 6y ago
    Yes, diet is important. Feed young kids jerky and other things that take some effort to chew. It makes the jaw grow so there will be more room. Another thing told to me by a mechanical engineer who is the son of a dentist: people from different countries can have different characteristics and inter-breeding may cause problems. He said oh, German teeth in an Irish mouth - the kid in question is indeed a mix from those two places. My kids ortho said they do things differently depending on race too. Example they gave was that Chinese teeth tend to be more straight across the front as opposed to more arched, so they take that into account when doing braces.
    - modeless 6y ago
      Jerky sounds like it would work, but probably not a great idea to eat every day. I've heard a lot of people saying kids should eat harder to chew foods but not a lot of suggestions about what hard-to-chew foods would actually be appropriate, healthy, not a choking hazard, and palatable to a toddler.
md_ 6y ago
Agreed, and a quick search on pubmed shows some research that backs the claim that these are modern conditions. https://whyy.org/segments/could-old-skulls-help-us-understand-why-we-have-crooked-teeth/ https://whyy.org/segments/could-old-skulls-help-us-understan... describes a few hypotheses as to why, one of which aligns with Mews’ claim. I was disappointed the article didn’t engage more with the prospect that Mews is simply (or additionally) a grifter, though. His very own claim seems to be that you cannot treat adults with his techniques, yet he appears to accept money from adults for treatment nonetheless. Were the article primarily about the scientific claims, it could have used a more empirical approach. As a profile of a potentially dishonest subject, it also failed to dig deep enough, and Mews’ patients—who have their own psychological issues—may well be the victims.
- formerly_proven 6y ago
  If there are basically no skulls to be found with misaligned teeth and jaws, then what the article says is the mainstream explanation of this - genetics - has to be wrong, because genetics in humans doesn't do anything in 200 years. Especially not going from "~100% good outcomes" to "the majority of individuals have malformed teeth". Literally any other explanation is more plausible. Changes in food seems very plausible. Changes in upbringing as well.
  - iorrus 6y ago
    Fantastic comment and exactly correct. The genetics argument is a complete fabrication, what I’ve heard before is that infants don’t eat enough solid food e.g. meat on the bone when younger but instead too much puréed soft food. But I’ve no idea if this is correct. But something is off.
    - trhway 6y ago
      anekdotal evidence of a related principle - after several years of regular hiking i had noticed some slight bone shape changes - a bit larger kind of protrusions where tendons/muscles attach to the bone, so it doesn't sound surprising that the chin bone would respond to the chewing load, especially in the younger years when the things have much higher plasticity. It is also pretty known that a loss of tooth is with time followed by a local bone loss.
chubot 6y ago
See my comment below, and the book "Breath" by Nestor: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24247066 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24247066 And this one about the book "Jaws" by Kahn: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23435964 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23435964 The short answer is that two big changes in human history led to this problem: 1. Agriculture. Our diets drastically changed when we started growing food, and that had enormous impact on our jaw, breathing, and facial structure. If you've read Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs and Steel) or more recently Sapiens, you'll understand this. They describe agriculture as an advance for the human race, but a setback for individual humans! 2. The industrial revolution. There was a huge population explosion, and we fed all those mouths with even more monotonous diets (more bread, rice, corn, factory farms, etc.) This is taking agriculture to the next level. We replaced animal power with machines in many cases. ----- If you want a visual, the book "Jaws" tells about Europeans who came to the Americas in ~1600. The Europeans had the benefits of technology that let them travel across the sea, but were closer to 5 feet tall, and they had terrible teeth, and malnutrition. There was a dentist by the name of Price who observed the Native Americans. Basically he was like "WOW they are 6 feet tall and they have beautiful jaws! They breathe through their nose and not their mouth. They don't sleep with their mouths wide open, and they don't snore." Mouth breathing is a sign of poor breathing. Just like a boxer knows to breathe through his nose, but when he gets hit too much and tired, he starts breathing through his mouth. When you're sleeping, you're supposed to breathe through your nose as well (because the organ is made for it), but many people breathe through their mouths due to having obstructed airways. Which are result of diet, weight, and lifestyle.
gwern 6y ago
I don't think there is any resolution. This looks like one of those very common cases in science/technology and elsewhere with outsiders: they are more acute as critics than creators. That is, often outsiders accurately identify problems and gaps and anomalies that the insiders prefer to paper over (sometimes because the outsiders used to be insiders and know where the bodies are buried). But, when they propose their own constructive theories, they are no better than anyone else and their proposals may be as bad as their criticisms are good. So it sounds like the journalist came away convinced that orthodontists etc have quietly papered over their lack of a real theory as to where all orthodontic problems come from, why they are such a peculiarly modern problem, and why braces are only temporary solutions, and the Mews have done a service in showing that the emperor has no clothes, - but also that they are doing everyone a disservice in that their own suggested interventions are unproven and likely pseudoscience.
- dennis_jeeves 6y ago
  >I don't think there is any resolution. Correct, they are the heretics. Very true in science ( slightly less so in technology), religion or any establishment really. Perhaps medicine is the most affected, and the price paid is enormous.
- aaron695 6y ago
  > but also that they are doing everyone a disservice in that their own suggested interventions are unproven and likely pseudoscience. 1. This applies ongoing pressure to fix the hole. 2. It is an incentive to find a hole. It's possible to find significant problems not spoken about in most current fields. But there is no system to reward and then fix this. Bug bounties came about because the alternate was selling to BlackHats or extra Karma for non-disclosed releases.
lkrubner 6y ago
I've read that this is due to the lack of sunlight. There was a surge of people moving to the cities. Suddenly people were spending 12 hours a day working in a dark factory instead of working in a field. Even now, in 2020, look across the world. There are some very poor areas of the world that have bad health care, but people are safe from certain problems because they are still working in fields, even as children, and they get plenty of sunlight.
- wussboy 6y ago
  I think we must be careful to remember that correlation is not causation. I remember reading a website back 10 years ago where someone made the same case except it was the wearing of shoes, not the lack of sunlight that caused all the problems. In sure there have been other hypothesis in the past and there will be more in the future.
sdenton4 6y ago
Well, before modern dentistry, if you've got a sufficiently bad dental problem you die from an abscess.
rsynnott 6y ago
I feel like there’s a contradiction in the article; it’s mentioned that the son, who was a ‘success story’, needed premolars removed, and that seemed to be portrayed as a success. Now, no-one was regularly removing premolars one the pre-modern era, and as I understand it the sort of crowding that might indicate removing premolars does cause (often minor, cosmetic) orthodontic issues. So presumably the orthodontically perfect pre-moderns weren’t using something analogous to this guy’s magic treatment then.

wendyshu 6y ago

So industry, but not agriculture, screwed up people's faces - a puzzle. Pollution? Watery processed e.g. canned foods (as mentioned in the article)? Preservative methods that replaced older foods like hardtack and tough salted meat?

klipt 6y ago
https://whyy.org/segments/could-old-skulls-help-us-understand-why-we-have-crooked-teeth/ https://whyy.org/segments/could-old-skulls-help-us-understan... mentions a hypothesized shift from breast feeding to bottle feeding during the industrial revolution.

drcode 6y ago

Dentistry seems like an extremely conservative profession, and one that received very little attention from outsiders. This story definitely makes me wonder if there are still a lot of "low hanging fruit" in dentistry that have been left unexplored. It does seem rather strange that nearly be 100% of parents are told that their kids' mouths are terribly messed up and need expensive procedures. Never are parents offered any convincing scientific explanation for why everyone's mouth seems to go counter to all the usual biological rules of evolutionary adaptation.

dragonwriter 6y ago
> Never are parents offered any convincing scientific explanation for why everyone's mouth seems to go counter to all the usual biological rules of evolutionary adaptation. Dentists (like medical doctors) generally aren't evolutionary biologists, and even if they were that also, we (humanity collectively) know a lot more about function than the evolutionary pressures that produce it. That said, the contribution, the contribution of optimum tooth alignment over a modern lifespan to reproductive fitness is probably very low over most of human evolution.
klipt 6y ago
Implant dentistry seems to acknowledge that jawbones atrophy without exposure to bite forces, which is one reason they recommend implants over false teeth. False teeth don't transit enough bite force to the jawbone, which causes atrophy and leads to the recessed chins common in older toothless people.
- phkahler 6y ago
  Yes, diet is important. Feed young kids jerky and other things that take some effort to chew. It makes the jaw grow so there will be more room. Another thing told to me by a mechanical engineer who is the son of a dentist: people from different countries can have different characteristics and inter-breeding may cause problems. He said oh, German teeth in an Irish mouth - the kid in question is indeed a mix from those two places. My kids ortho said they do things differently depending on race too. Example they gave was that Chinese teeth tend to be more straight across the front as opposed to more arched, so they take that into account when doing braces.
  - modeless 6y ago
    Jerky sounds like it would work, but probably not a great idea to eat every day. I've heard a lot of people saying kids should eat harder to chew foods but not a lot of suggestions about what hard-to-chew foods would actually be appropriate, healthy, not a choking hazard, and palatable to a toddler.

md_ 6y ago

Agreed, and a quick search on pubmed shows some research that backs the claim that these are modern conditions. https://whyy.org/segments/could-old-skulls-help-us-understand-why-we-have-crooked-teeth/ https://whyy.org/segments/could-old-skulls-help-us-understan... describes a few hypotheses as to why, one of which aligns with Mews’ claim. I was disappointed the article didn’t engage more with the prospect that Mews is simply (or additionally) a grifter, though. His very own claim seems to be that you cannot treat adults with his techniques, yet he appears to accept money from adults for treatment nonetheless. Were the article primarily about the scientific claims, it could have used a more empirical approach. As a profile of a potentially dishonest subject, it also failed to dig deep enough, and Mews’ patients—who have their own psychological issues—may well be the victims.

formerly_proven 6y ago
If there are basically no skulls to be found with misaligned teeth and jaws, then what the article says is the mainstream explanation of this - genetics - has to be wrong, because genetics in humans doesn't do anything in 200 years. Especially not going from "~100% good outcomes" to "the majority of individuals have malformed teeth". Literally any other explanation is more plausible. Changes in food seems very plausible. Changes in upbringing as well.
- iorrus 6y ago
  Fantastic comment and exactly correct. The genetics argument is a complete fabrication, what I’ve heard before is that infants don’t eat enough solid food e.g. meat on the bone when younger but instead too much puréed soft food. But I’ve no idea if this is correct. But something is off.
  - trhway 6y ago
    anekdotal evidence of a related principle - after several years of regular hiking i had noticed some slight bone shape changes - a bit larger kind of protrusions where tendons/muscles attach to the bone, so it doesn't sound surprising that the chin bone would respond to the chewing load, especially in the younger years when the things have much higher plasticity. It is also pretty known that a loss of tooth is with time followed by a local bone loss.

chubot 6y ago

See my comment below, and the book "Breath" by Nestor: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24247066 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24247066 And this one about the book "Jaws" by Kahn: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23435964 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23435964 The short answer is that two big changes in human history led to this problem: 1. Agriculture. Our diets drastically changed when we started growing food, and that had enormous impact on our jaw, breathing, and facial structure. If you've read Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs and Steel) or more recently Sapiens, you'll understand this. They describe agriculture as an advance for the human race, but a setback for individual humans! 2. The industrial revolution. There was a huge population explosion, and we fed all those mouths with even more monotonous diets (more bread, rice, corn, factory farms, etc.) This is taking agriculture to the next level. We replaced animal power with machines in many cases. ----- If you want a visual, the book "Jaws" tells about Europeans who came to the Americas in ~1600. The Europeans had the benefits of technology that let them travel across the sea, but were closer to 5 feet tall, and they had terrible teeth, and malnutrition. There was a dentist by the name of Price who observed the Native Americans. Basically he was like "WOW they are 6 feet tall and they have beautiful jaws! They breathe through their nose and not their mouth. They don't sleep with their mouths wide open, and they don't snore." Mouth breathing is a sign of poor breathing. Just like a boxer knows to breathe through his nose, but when he gets hit too much and tired, he starts breathing through his mouth. When you're sleeping, you're supposed to breathe through your nose as well (because the organ is made for it), but many people breathe through their mouths due to having obstructed airways. Which are result of diet, weight, and lifestyle.

gwern 6y ago

I don't think there is any resolution. This looks like one of those very common cases in science/technology and elsewhere with outsiders: they are more acute as critics than creators. That is, often outsiders accurately identify problems and gaps and anomalies that the insiders prefer to paper over (sometimes because the outsiders used to be insiders and know where the bodies are buried). But, when they propose their own constructive theories, they are no better than anyone else and their proposals may be as bad as their criticisms are good. So it sounds like the journalist came away convinced that orthodontists etc have quietly papered over their lack of a real theory as to where all orthodontic problems come from, why they are such a peculiarly modern problem, and why braces are only temporary solutions, and the Mews have done a service in showing that the emperor has no clothes, - but also that they are doing everyone a disservice in that their own suggested interventions are unproven and likely pseudoscience.

dennis_jeeves 6y ago
>I don't think there is any resolution. Correct, they are the heretics. Very true in science ( slightly less so in technology), religion or any establishment really. Perhaps medicine is the most affected, and the price paid is enormous.
aaron695 6y ago
> but also that they are doing everyone a disservice in that their own suggested interventions are unproven and likely pseudoscience. 1. This applies ongoing pressure to fix the hole. 2. It is an incentive to find a hole. It's possible to find significant problems not spoken about in most current fields. But there is no system to reward and then fix this. Bug bounties came about because the alternate was selling to BlackHats or extra Karma for non-disclosed releases.

lkrubner 6y ago

I've read that this is due to the lack of sunlight. There was a surge of people moving to the cities. Suddenly people were spending 12 hours a day working in a dark factory instead of working in a field. Even now, in 2020, look across the world. There are some very poor areas of the world that have bad health care, but people are safe from certain problems because they are still working in fields, even as children, and they get plenty of sunlight.

wussboy 6y ago
I think we must be careful to remember that correlation is not causation. I remember reading a website back 10 years ago where someone made the same case except it was the wearing of shoes, not the lack of sunlight that caused all the problems. In sure there have been other hypothesis in the past and there will be more in the future.

sdenton4 6y ago

Well, before modern dentistry, if you've got a sufficiently bad dental problem you die from an abscess.

rsynnott 6y ago

I feel like there’s a contradiction in the article; it’s mentioned that the son, who was a ‘success story’, needed premolars removed, and that seemed to be portrayed as a success. Now, no-one was regularly removing premolars one the pre-modern era, and as I understand it the sort of crowding that might indicate removing premolars does cause (often minor, cosmetic) orthodontic issues. So presumably the orthodontically perfect pre-moderns weren’t using something analogous to this guy’s magic treatment then.