No worries - you’re not alone! Basically, we’re experts in anatomy and physiology. We look at where your body is right now and how it is functioning.

Let’s break down what “orofacial myofunctional therapy” means:
Oro = Mouth
Facial = Face
Myo = Muscle
Functional Therapy = Activites you need to every day, like eating and sleeping!

Are you waking up feeling fully rested? Are you a messy or picky eater? Do you have body aches? Is there a speech or sensory issue? Can you breathe through your nose during the day and night? Believe it or not, there is usually a simple solution you can achieve in just a few sessions! (Check out our Real Results page!)

We view the body as a fully connected system, not just a set of individual parts. We think of it as a "head-to-toe" approach.

Often, the place where you feel pain is just the symptom, not the source of the problem. When a muscle in one area isn't working in its most optimal way, your body will find a workaround to get the job done. This compensation causes strain on other muscle groups, which can lead to that frustrating cycle of pain, discomfort, and new symptoms.

Instead of just treating the one muscle that hurts, we assess how your entire body is working together. This allows us to find the root cause of the strain and help stop that cycle for good.

This is why our multi-disciplinary team is so effective. Your specific needs may involve our speech-language pathologists, physical therapists, and occupational therapists, who all collaborate to see your full picture. We're here to help you find the cause, not just chase the symptoms. You deserve it!

The minimum training required to become a “therapist” is surprisingly low - as little as 28 hours. (For comparison, it takes 200 hours to become a yoga teacher!)

We believe our patients deserve far more.

At our practice, our team members are all highly experienced, licensed speech, physical, or occupational therapists. We hold extensive graduate-level training - far beyond a standard Master's degree.

This deep clinical expertise is just the beginning. We are dedicated to providing you with the most comprehensive and elite care available. That's why we travel to national and international conferences multiple times per year.

This field is evolving at an incredible pace, with new research, technological advances, and deeper collaboration with medical and dental fields happening constantly. Staying on top of these developments is critical, and it allows us to optimize your progress, saving you time and money.

We work with individuals of all ages — newborns, infants, children, and adults!

Therapy can help if you or your child experiences:

• Mouth Breathing or Snoring Helps establish nasal breathing and strengthens airway muscles to reduce snoring and improve sleep.

• Sleep Disordered Breathing or Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA) Tones tongue and throat muscles to help keep the airway open during sleep. It's an effective supplemental treatment to CPAP or other medical care.

• Tongue Thrust Corrects an improper swallow where the tongue pushes against the teeth, a primary cause of open bites and orthodontic relapse.

• TMJ / Jaw Pain and Clenching Rebalances face and jaw muscles by correcting tongue posture and swallowing, which can reduce TMJ pain, tension, and clicking.

• Support for Orthodontics (Braces) Helps stabilize orthodontic results. By correcting a tongue thrust, therapy stops the tongue from pushing teeth out of alignment, which prevents relapse after braces.

• Speech Difficulties Improves speech issues (like a lisp) that are related to poor tongue posture or a tongue thrust.

• Difficulty Chewing or Swallowing Coordinates muscles for chewing and swallowing, making mealtimes more efficient and comfortable.

Addressing these needs early is crucial because your child is still growing.

Improper muscle patterns, like mouth breathing or a "tongue thrust," are actively shaping how your child's head, airway, and jaws develop. These dysfunctional habits quickly become ingrained.

We have a critical window to intervene. Our goal is to guide your child's growth to optimize their structures for a lifetime of healthy function. This becomes much more difficult after puberty, when the skull bones "cement" into place.

Early intervention promotes a healthy body, establishes restful sleep, and can limit the need for other therapies. The benefits start immediately and last a lifetime, improving both oral and medical health.

Research links untreated myofunctional issues to a lifetime of health complications, including sleep-disordered breathing, dental problems, learning difficulties, and poor psycho-social well-being.

Simply put: It is much easier to guide growth now than to correct structural problems later.

A myofunctional disorder will not be outgrown.

A tongue or airway that isn't working optimally won't fix itself. Instead, the body finds another muscle (or group of muscles!) to help out as a "compensation." These compensations can be seen in infants as young as one week old.

The older a person gets, the more these compensations develop and the deeper ingrained the dysfunctional habits become. These long-term compensations are what lead to a wide range of lifelong challenges.

If left untreated, these issues can contribute to:

• Orthodontic Relapse: The "undoing" of expensive orthodontic work. If the tongue continues to push against the teeth, it will move them back out of alignment.

• Sleep Disordered Breathing: This includes snoring, restless sleep, waking up tired, and sleep apnea. It's often an issue of poor sleep quality, not quantity.

• Learning & Attention Difficulties: Poor quality sleep directly impacts a child's ability to focus, learn, and remember, which can sometimes be misidentified as ADHD.

• Chronic Pain or Tension: Improper posture of the tongue and jaw can lead to pain in the TMJ, neck, and back.

• Speech Difficulties: Issues like lisps, mumbling, or stuttering may be slow to improve in traditional therapy, leading to frustration for the child, parent, and therapist.

• Eating & Digestive Issues: This can look like picky eating, messy or open-mouth chewing, and can even contribute to digestive issues like reflux and constipation.

• Psycho-Social Challenges: This is a crucial one. We find many patients are seen as "difficult" or "lazy" because they struggle to pay attention, listen, or follow directions. They are trying their best, but their body is struggling with a core issue (like poor breathing). We often see these behaviors disappear once the root issue is addressed.

Yes, a comprehensive evaluation is the required first step before beginning therapy.

This in-depth assessment is essential for two main reasons:

1. It is necessary for developing a high-quality, effective therapy program customized to your specific needs.

2. A formal evaluation is required for any potential insurance reimbursement.

Our evaluations are incredibly thorough, lasting up to two hours. Patients are often astounded by the level of detail in our reports, which help connect the dots on symptoms you may have been experiencing for years.

We offer in-person services in our Rochester clinic and virtually throughout Michigan and Ohio.

We require evaluations to be in-person but are very supportive of virtual therapy sessions going forward! An occasional in-person session may be required every 1-2 months, but we will do our best to work with you!

From the first time we meet, we will start retraining the muscles of your mouth, face, and tongue to function correctly.

We do this through a series of simple, specific exercises customized to your needs. We design these activities to be as fun and applicable to daily life as possible! You’ll notice improvement from your first session!

It depends on what best fits your schedule and individualized needs. Some households prefer a fast, intense burst of therapy, whereas others need a slightly slower rate (such as every 2 weeks).

Your therapy plan is 100% customized to you. We truly embrace that every patient and family has unique needs!

We will design a plan that works best for your specific situation.

• Session Length: Sessions may be 30, 45, or 60 minutes long.

• Frequency: We find the most success with weekly or every-other-week appointments to build a strong foundation.

However, we will absolutely adjust this schedule based on your family's needs! This may be influenced by one’s medical/dental needs, age, ability, attention, travel, financials, or whether you are seeing us in-person or virtually, or if multiple family members are being treated the same day.

A full therapy program is typically completed in 6-12 months. Once you have mastered the foundational skills, your appointments will become much more spread out. We get it - we’re busy, too (and no one wants to hang out in ‘tongue therapy’ more than they have to) :)

To best address our patients’ needs and provide our very best clinical work, we are an out-of-network service provider. Our services are often covered by out-of-network benefits, but this varies with each plan. We will provide you with step-by-step written guidance to make this process as easy as possible to seek reimbursement with your insurance company. We do not participate with Medicaid or Medicare.

We do all of the work except submit the paperwork to your insurance company. Once you submit the paperwork, your insurance company may reimburse your services directly to you.

Absolutely - and always with your permission! Collaboration is a key component of our treatment philosophy.

We firmly believe that working as a team with your doctor, dentist, orthodontist, or school is essential to providing the best patient care.

That's a great question, and it’s a logical one! However, the body is far too complex for just a simple "snip." (And frankly, we prefer a far less aggressive release method that’s more beneficial, but that’s another discussion, if necessary with your therapist!)

Think of it this way: A tongue tie release is like getting a brand-new gym membership. The potential for movement is there, but you still need a personal trainer (that's us!) to teach your muscles what to do.

Therapy is essential to:

1. Breaks Old Habits: Your tongue has been restricted its whole life. Without therapy, it will keep its old, poor-functioning habits, and your brain will continue to use the wrong muscles to compensate.

2. Learn New Skills: We have to teach your brain and tongue how to work together in a new way (called neuromuscular facilitation). Therapy gives your tongue the strength and coordination it needs, and then teaches it what to do with its new freedom.

3. Ensure a Better Release Procedure: Your treatment team has an ethical obligation to make sure you are ready for a release. Your pre-therapy exercises show your provider that you're ready, help them know exactly how much tissue to release, and even help protect your tongue from injury during the procedure.

Skipping therapy is like getting the gym membership but never learning the right way to lift—you won't get the results you want and you risk getting hurt. Therapy is the "training" that ensures the release is a long-term success.

This is a very common question! In the past, tongue ties were often only identified if they caused obvious breastfeeding problems in infancy.

Many children and adults develop clever "work-arounds" (compensations) to be able to eat, speak, and breathe around the tongue's restriction. However, these compensations aren't ideal and can eventually lead to other issues, such as:

• Jaw pain (TMD)

• Mouth breathing

• Sleep-disordered breathing or snoring

• Orthodontic relapse (teeth shifting after braces)

• Speech issues

The medical and dental fields now have a much better understanding of how a restricted tongue impacts the entire body. It is likely that the symptoms you're experiencing now are what led a trained provider to finally identify the tongue tie as the root cause.

That's a very common situation! An infant release is often done to allow for successful breastfeeding.

However, as a child grows, signs and symptoms of a restricted tongue can reappear (often around ages 4-6). This is because the body is growing, but the old restriction may still be present.

If new symptoms appear, a "revision" (another release) may be necessary, but we will always do our best work with therapy first! Our goal is to resolve the issues with exercises whenever possible.

It is very unlikely. School-based services are provided to allow students to access the curriculum; there needs to be a social, behavioral, or academic reason to receive services. Even if Speech services are provided, a clinician needs to obtain significant training in orofacial myofunctional disorders; it is a specialty with an extensive knowledge base and is quickly evolving.

Additionally, a medical team is often critical for team collaboration, and this is very challenging to support in the school setting. Further, many clinicians don’t understand that the exercises are training specific muscles to facilitate a strong, healthy swallow.