Tongue-Tie Treatment

Children who are newborns, sometimes they have difficulty nursing. Moms will know because they'll have all sorts of difficulties with nursing. They'll be sore, they'll be inflamed, they'll get infections.

That's a sign that nursing is not going well. Nursing, I'm not going to say that it should be perfectly comfortable. I'm not a woman, I've not been in that scenario, but it should be a comfortable experience between you and a connecting experience between you and your baby.

That's what we know about nursing. You're nurturing your baby, but if your baby is tied, and it could be a tongue or a lip tied, they're not getting a natural latch. They're not getting a good deep latch, and so they won't be able to suckle properly.

They'll become gassy. They won't want to lay down because the gas built up here makes them uncomfortable. They'll kick and move their legs a lot.

They'll get burpy. You'll have to burp them excessively. They'll leak whenever they're nursing.

They'll fall asleep when they're nursing because the effort is too hard. They may clamp when they're nursing rather than doing a nutritive suckle. There's a lot of different signs about that.

They'll come up with a callus on their lip just because they're not getting a proper latch. There's a lot of reasons why, and maybe they don't sleep longer, there's a lot of reasons why we would do that for the baby. For the baby, we use the laser.

Yes, there's some aftercare that we have to do, and we do it as soon as possible because their muscles are creating this habit, and so if we don't do it soon enough, that habit becomes harder and harder to overcome. So we've seen babies, I've seen a three-day-old, not three-month-old, or three-week-old, three-day-old, and we're doing lip and tongue tie revisions, and moms can then immediately nurse and immediately recognize the difference. The longer it goes, the longer it takes us for them to overcome that habit that they were creating, but moms feel better.

Babies feel better. They nurse better. They feel easier.

They're just more sated, and they sleep better. I mean, these are all things that we talk to moms about, so that's one reason why we would do it. The other reason is for adults.

Why would you do that in adulthood if it's all about nurturing? Like, all of us adults can eat. We figured out some way to eat, right? Textures. If you're having difficulty with textures because your tongue's tied down, and you can't actually move the food around easily to chew, if you think about when you're chewing, you use your tongue to shift the food to either side, but if you can't do that well, you end up gagging on things, and so you'll become more texture specific.

You're like, I like these, and so it limits your food choices. It could be breathing, so if you're tied down and back, if the tongue's tied down and back, it's in your airway, so some people will actually experience sleep apnea or snoring, and then while they do that, a lot of times their body will actually thrust the jaw forward, and as it's doing that, it's bringing the tongue forward, so a lot of people say, I grind my teeth at night, and it's like, no, you don't grind your teeth at night. You're shifting your jaw forward to get the tongue out of your airway, so you have an airway problem.

You don't have a grinding problem. You have an airway problem, and the tied tongue that's tied down and back is that problem, or at least a component of the problem. When we start talking about airway, it could be multifactorial, but at least it's part of the problem, so we need to start talking about that, so oftentimes when people come in and say, I want to know about tongue tie, okay, well then we need to also talk probably to an ENT, probably to somebody else who we call oral myofunctional therapist, but yes, you're in the right spot to talk to me, and we can be the quarterback to start talking to those other specialists as we engage in your care.