I just wrote this letter to a collegue and thought your might want to evesdrop (unedited)....
December 24, 2010
Dear T.,
We met in Chicago at the first MRC meeting, and recently, I met your staff at the MRC center near LA. (They glow when they speak about you BTW - even when you're driving them crazy...) I've become quite involved with this preventive orthodontic concept, and all along I've been meaning to contact you.
Through German Ramirez, I've been asked to develop a curriculum for the pedo residents at Mt. Sinai medical in NYC. After a pilot run last Spring, I'm in the middle of a 14 lecture series. The more I learn, the more there is to add. What's amazing to me is that the knowledge has been around for 130 years and has emerged and receded many times over.
Our focus on malocclusion as "the problem" and not as "a symptom" is a narrow perspective and has limited our profession from Angle on. I'm thinking that it's been much easier for us to concentrate on mechanics and mechanisms than it is on behaviors and training. Otherwise, we'd have become psychologists. My vision, however, is for us to become the physicians of the face and not just the mechanics of the teeth. Especially as mechanotherapy becomes more systematized and delegatable, it should be obvious that a transition like this is advisable, if not inevitable.
The other issue is the assumption that malocclusion is an unsolvable tangle of genetic factors that will never be able to be engineered enough to put us out of business. However, Chris and John Flutter, and my reading of Mew, and Price, and Tomes and all the people in Functional schools, have opened my eyes to a new way of thinking: the MAJORITY of malocclusions (aside from tooth size and number anomalies, and more severe syndromes) have a developmental component that is only given lip service by conventional orthodontic thinking. Our real business should be about controlling those factors so that malocclusions are eliminated or minimized in the first place. Would we want it any other way for our own children with any other disease? Of course, that means intercepting the harmful factors when they are of influence, i.e. from birth on. Again, with our current trend of bad-mouthing early treatment, we are headed in the wrong direction.
Terry, that puts me swimming upstream. And when it comes to my private ortho practice - well, even Chris knows that this paradigm shift has to be profitable enough from the get-go to make a transition smooth enough to attract interest.
I was uninitiated in Chicago. But what I remember of our conversation, you've probably considered all this before. While I've met many people that see things in this new light, only a very few are orthodontists, as you can imagine. I want to think that I'm not alone - frankly, I don't want to be alone. My mission is to bring a bunch of people along with me. In the meantime, I'd like to have a "friend" (do we ever grow up?). I'm thinking you are far enough ahead of me to be a good companion. Interested in (or have time for) a conversation? Who else do you know that is going on this ride?
Through German Ramirez, I've been asked to develop a curriculum for the pedo residents at Mt. Sinai medical in NYC. After a pilot run last Spring, I'm in the middle of a 14 lecture series. The more I learn, the more there is to add. What's amazing to me is that the knowledge has been around for 130 years and has emerged and receded many times over.
Our focus on malocclusion as "the problem" and not as "a symptom" is a narrow perspective and has limited our profession from Angle on. I'm thinking that it's been much easier for us to concentrate on mechanics and mechanisms than it is on behaviors and training. Otherwise, we'd have become psychologists. My vision, however, is for us to become the physicians of the face and not just the mechanics of the teeth. Especially as mechanotherapy becomes more systematized and delegatable, it should be obvious that a transition like this is advisable, if not inevitable.
The other issue is the assumption that malocclusion is an unsolvable tangle of genetic factors that will never be able to be engineered enough to put us out of business. However, Chris and John Flutter, and my reading of Mew, and Price, and Tomes and all the people in Functional schools, have opened my eyes to a new way of thinking: the MAJORITY of malocclusions (aside from tooth size and number anomalies, and more severe syndromes) have a developmental component that is only given lip service by conventional orthodontic thinking. Our real business should be about controlling those factors so that malocclusions are eliminated or minimized in the first place. Would we want it any other way for our own children with any other disease? Of course, that means intercepting the harmful factors when they are of influence, i.e. from birth on. Again, with our current trend of bad-mouthing early treatment, we are headed in the wrong direction.
Terry, that puts me swimming upstream. And when it comes to my private ortho practice - well, even Chris knows that this paradigm shift has to be profitable enough from the get-go to make a transition smooth enough to attract interest.
I was uninitiated in Chicago. But what I remember of our conversation, you've probably considered all this before. While I've met many people that see things in this new light, only a very few are orthodontists, as you can imagine. I want to think that I'm not alone - frankly, I don't want to be alone. My mission is to bring a bunch of people along with me. In the meantime, I'd like to have a "friend" (do we ever grow up?). I'm thinking you are far enough ahead of me to be a good companion. Interested in (or have time for) a conversation? Who else do you know that is going on this ride?
Sincerely,
Barry
