WTF is that???? And why is it extremely important to how this whole shit works?
So I need to credit a lot of what I’m about to say to one of the best OG’s of this game… Marcello Mazza.
Marcello and I were pretty tight back in 2015-2018 as we were figuring out this game and he was far superior to me on the technical dentistry shit (I honestly didn’t have that much interest in it).
Here is a post i made about Marcello in case you want to learn more about him.
In any case, one thing that he’d talk about a lot was the importance of the ‘curve of spee.’
And while me and Marcello disagree on some of the elements of how this shit works.. this is one area where we are in definite agreement and I need to give him props where props are due.
Today i’m going to talk about why you need to care about what this thing is.
And why people that don’t know shit like this are tier 2 rather than tier 1 thinkers.
What is a curve of spee?
And in a healthy skull and mouth you have a nice curve like the one above.
As you go further back in the mouth, the contact goes further up and up.
A great way to see this is to use a flat plane splint with contacts on the back four teeth. I did exactly this on and off between the years of 2016 - 2018.
You bite down on the lower splint with occlusal paper like you see above and it leaves a trail of ink spots like you see below.
Now typically when you bite it does not leave an even trail like this. So you need to drill the heavy ink spots down. Then bite again.
And you keep biting with the occlusal paper and drilling till you have even contacts on all back four teeth on either side.
I spent hundreds of hours doing this back in the day. And when I talk about it now, it brings fond ole memories. LOL
Why is it important?
So if you did the drilling of the spots as I mentioned above and you had a healthy mouth… then if you were to look at the splint from the side it would look like it slopes upwards at the back.
Like the image on the right side above with the red line sloping up.
Whereas the image on the left the plane is completely flat.
A person whose occlusal plane has a healthy curve will typically have a good spine and skull. If a person has a completely flat occlusal plane than they would have massive skull, spine and overall health issues.
If your occlusal plane remained completely flat like the pic on the left than you would even be at high risk of a neurological disease.
This is all stuff that Marcello used to talk about a lot back in 2017-18 on his Facebook group, Biomechanical Dystonia, which is now defunct.
I am in this game because a dentist flattened my occlusal plane
If you think about my origin story in 2015of how the problem started.. it essentially started by a dentist in Vietnam drilling down my back teeth and flattening my occlusal plane.
Before that I always had a pretty healthy spine and no major health issues.
Within 2-3 months of him doing that I was well on my way to a neurological disease and shitloads of stuff was going wrong .
Almost the same exact thing happened with Marcello. His origin story was that he was a healthy guy in his forties running marathons when a TMJ dentist drilled his teeth flat.
And some months later he was in a wheelchair with cervical dystonia. Which he had for the next seven years and it nearly completely ruined his life.
Till we both figured out how this stuff worked back in 2015-16.
Now he’s completely fine. Why?
He put back the curve of spee.
How did my experiments reinforce this fact?
I would have a splint where all the contacts (left by the occlusal paper) were even and then i’d do some yoga for an hour.
Then when i bit on the occlusal paper the contacts changed.
So i drilled the heavy contacts till it was even again.
Then i’d repeat. Again and again. Day after day.
And after awhile i realized i was always drilling on the front of the splint. And the splint was turning into more of a curve with the front being far lower than the back.
Eureka!
I was giving myself a curve of spee again!
At the same time my skull and body were improving quickly.
Every recovery in my body or complexion was always accompanied by a change in the occlusal contacts.
Which is how i concluded that “you do not change your spine/structure without changing your occlusion. PERIOD!!!!”
Some parting thoughts
This shit is like an onion.
You watch a bunch of videos on Mewing or about TMJ and you are at the outermost layer. ie. you don’t actually understand jack shit still.
You do reseach for some months, visit a TMJ dentist or two, and you peeled back another layer. And have a deeper understanding.
When you keep peeling layer after layer you start getting to the shit that I talk about above. The shit that most TMJ dentists do not even understand.
The stuff that I probably wouldn’t understand if i didnt have exposure to a guy like Marcello who understood more about dentistry than 99% of dentists. Because he applied an engineering mind into truly understanding all of this stuff at a first principles level.
And hopefully you will realize that even though my answer to how to solve this shit is simple (ie. add vertical + unlock occlusion)…
…my understanding for how it works has a depth that will take you years to come close to.
And i paid for that depth with blood, sweat and tears. And nearly a decade of my life.