Damage Caused By Thumb Suck

Hi, this is Dr. Donald Fox, orthodontists and expert on how to get your child to stop Thumb sucking, fingers sucking, time sucking and Binky pacifiers. Yes, there is a technology out now that I've actually developed. I've tripped over those 25 years ago and it's in my new book called Stop Thumb Suck Revolution. It's saw an available at Barnes and noble, Apple and Amazon, which also you have uh, odd books and also nook. It's in digital and paperback. The purpose of this video today is to teach you the different damages that can be done by thumb sucking. Thumb sucking is supposed to stop at age two. Even in the certain articles you may read on the internet says he can go up to age five and no problems. That's not true. I've seen this, I've been doing this for 31 years. I consider myself an expert in the field of number of people.

Not only that, I've gotten to stop thumb suck usually within one hour to one week, but all the damage op repaired and it has to, the damage has to be repaired starting at age six or seven, not age 10 or 12 if your child comes in with the damage done from thumb sucking or finger sucking a, the [inaudible] going to end up having jaw surgery. I'm gonna tell you that ahead of time or we're not. This is not something you want the permanent teeth to come into the damaged area where the baby teeth work. So we're going to go over that right now. How does the damage occur? First of all, this is a mouth and the mouth has a certain width across here and across the bottom. So when a child sucks, so this muscle here called the bucks Nader, you can look this up, B, U, C, C, I N a T O R goes in and it causes the mouth on the lower and the upper to get squished and next thing you know the mouth is too skinny and there's not enough room to the teeth at age six.

Then now the mouth has to be widened with certain devices. I use plastic devices that are economical. They don't cause as much and they don't hurt hardly at all. A lot of people use fix expanders. I'd just agree with them. The research says stop using them years ago because they expand too fast. So I believe in slow expansion over a five to six month period. The second, um, problem is that when a child puts their thumb in their mouth, here's the upper teeth and then their jaw can't get to the normal place anymore. So now their jaw is back and this actually about putting the thumb in the mouth keeps the jaw back and now even if you get the thumb out of there, the jaw will not grow out to where it's supposed to. Some people say it will catch up. No, you once it's back, it's back.

The jaw will not just grow out on its own. You need to make it grow out. There's devices also that do that. The next problem is that the, again, same thing, the child puts the thumb in the mouth and depends on how they suck. They actually can push these front teeth up and then some children, if they suck intensively, next thing you know they suck. And next thing you know the bone and the teeth are in the back are sub down. So now we have another problem. So now I've already presented to you three or four different things damaged and it's really disappointing because most of the 80% of the children come out and they have all the damages just went over. Okay, so to give you an idea about this, it's in my book again, stop thumb suck revolution. It's available. You go online at www.stopthumbsuckrevolution.com.

In suck revolution. And again, you can see this particular child, we'll look at the top photo first, pushed their upper front teeth out and then the back teeth in the back got sucked down. So this child had both when it was all done. You can see the before and after. And this is one of the cases I actually treated and I want it in the mouth. And then I got the tooth to come down and there was some other tricks and that bottom photo has permanent teeth and the damage that can be done also in this particular photo is the mouth is real skinny and the upper teeth stick out. The bottom is the after result and you can see the child's jaw is back on this photo. It's, we didn't get it to grow out and then they had teenage braces and now the face got totally corrected. And this girl was very beautiful when she was finished.

Not so lucky was a child who came in, we got him the stock thumb sucking and you can see over here the jaw is way back. The teeth were all bucked out, sticking out. We call it buck B U C K. this patient had to have jaw surgery because we, by the time we got them to stop sucking their thumb, they were already a teenager and the bone structures were now permanently damaged. So at age six or seven, you want to bring the child in so that we can handle these particular problems. Not all orthodontists are trained the same to do this, um, just cause they went to orthodontic school. There's a lot of other training that you know how to correct these type of problems. Um, I would say over half the orthodontists don't deal with early treatment. Then the other half, half of those, which now we're down to 25% of organize, have formal training and early treatment at age six.

And then out of that, how many people have the real expertise? I've treated over 25,000 patients in 31 years and over 7,000 of them were age six. The number of thumb suckers I've stopped, or at least over 2000 patients and most of them stopped within one week or less. An actually 50% stopped the pers night when they went home. Um, with the actual techniques that are in this book, um, this book has, has 37 habit busters. How those stops. Simple thumbs up problems like the Charles is doing it here and there, but if they're doing it day at night, there's some chapters in here that you sit down and read them to yourself and then you can practice, you know, with a neighbor or something. You don't have to, but you can go right then to then you can have the book out right in front of the child and just so you don't lose your place, do the techniques that says in the book and the child will stop just as well as you are to bring them to me.

Um, I do do one on one coaching with a child and take patients on to stop their thumb sock habits. Um, my orthodontist offices are from Deerfield beach, the South beach and South Florida. And uh, I welcome to um, meet you and your child, but particularly hopefully the book stops the problem and then we need to handle the damage. Please don't sit there and think this damage is going to go away. It is not going to go away. And it's really disheartening when you come in at age 10 or 11 and I tell you, you should have been here at age seven when the treatment could have been totally reversible. The damages from the thumb or the finger sucking. Again, this is Dr. Donald Fox, www.stopthumbsuckrevolution.com And I really enjoyed helping you or your child today with his damage and learning more about this problem. Thank you.