“What we know is a drop, what we do not know is an ocean”
— Isaac Newton
This was my mindset when I found myself in the pit of biomechanical collapse. As a newly graduated experimental biologist, I was left with a drop of knowledge in an ocean of possibilities. For 5 years I was trained to live on the edge of science and question what we believe to be possible and now, it was time for the most personal experiment of all: attempting to restore my face after years of braces.
Hypothesis: Humans can restore a collapsed facial structure as adults.
Apparently, this hypothesis was not interesting enough for any scientist to build their career upon, yet it’s too much to handle for those who do not understand the human body. So I’ll take over.
When you study science for years, there comes a point when you realize that no man will ever be able to make a final conclusion on what is possible and what is not. That’s the moment when you stop seeing studies as definitive verdicts and you dare to explore it yourself. So, I began by questioning the central dogma that states „Adult bone structure is fixed“. That belief never made sense to me. Actually, what I was taught was that bone is living tissue which can adapt, remodel, and respond to mechanical input throughout life. So to this day I don’t know why we were so hesistant to apply it to facial remodeling. Every orthopedist, dentist, or physical therapist uses this principle, whether they call it Wolff’s law or mechanotransduction, it does exist.
We even understand the physiology of this process; when pressure, tension, or load is applied to a bone, the cells within it (osteocytes, osteoblasts, and osteoclast) start communicating. They sense stress, change their activity, and literally reshape the bone’s microarchitecture. This is why braces move teeth, why fractures heal, why weight training changes bone density. The same principle applies to the craniofacial skeleton- only, here, the forces are subtler, more distributed and part of the complex system.
Complexity lies in this. The upper jaw (maxilla) is not a single fused bone but a complex of bones joined by sutures. These sutures are THE key for transforming the structure and remodelling happens through manipulating sutures along with the soft tissue outside of sutures. They allow remodelling because of the semi-flexibility they keep in adulthood, which means they allow micro-movements and still adapt to pressure changes. That essentially means that with consistent force the structure can, in fact, still grow, move and remodel. So, it’s actually bizzare we stayed away from the topic of natural adult facial restoration for so long, we knew the truth about plasticity but didn’t dare to test it on adults because they „stopped growing“.
Although humans do stop growing after a while, they keep the plasticity for their entire lives. That’s a very important distinction not many seem to understand, and when you put it in the context of environmental development, it becomes even more confusing. But all this simply means that the midpalatal suture responds to stress induced by oral postural habits, osteoblasts fill in new bone, and the entire facial framework rebalances. Forward growth follows the same logic: tension applied in the forward direction stimulates remodeling at the sutures and supports the maxilla’s natural trajectory of development. Maxilla-mandible, as well as maxilla-sphneoid-occiput-spine relationship is complex, they are under different mechanical forces that intertwine but… We’ll discuss that in another article. For now, it’s necessary to know that the principle on which structure operates is not complex nor new. It’s innate principle that serves many purposes, from airway function to nervous system recalibration.
Once this principle is used correctly in order to reverse the damage, maxilla expands and moves forward. Then every other bone realignes and adapts- airways expand, the posture improves, and the nervous system recalibrates. The entire structure pretty much has to reorganize around a new mechanical and neurological equilibrium. This is what made my face wider, projected forward and more symmetrical. Unfortunately, we know this principle better when it happens in reverse- as people get older their structure collapses which leads to compensations that keep the body in somewhat functional but far from optimal state.
Anyway, hypothesis has been confirmed and I have my own face as a proof that it is possible to restore facial structure through suture manipulation, habits and by triggering self-correction process we were born with. That’s all it took for me to fix it, that’s all it took for Anika and over 100 people in our community.
Oh, and if you’re one of the unbelievers, here’s my message for you: unless you seek the solution with everything within you, you won’t recognize it even if it’s right in front of you.