Orthotropics 0. History of Orthotropics.
My father was an orthodontist practicing in the times of Edward Angle who is considered by many to be the Father of Orthodontics. Although Angle was best known for developing non-extraction orthodontics he also believed in the influence of the soft tissues saying “Orthodontic treatments are very unlikely to succeed, if the functional disorders are still going on”; a philosophy very similar to my own Tropic Premise.
I never met Charles Tweed although I knew many people who had. He was a free thinking student of Edward angles and the two of them often had heated debates, especially over extractions. He refused to accept Angle’s view that if you followed the rules the case would be stable.
So he tried extracting first premolars and at a famous meeting in 1940 showed 100 non-extraction cases using Angles technique methods all of which had relapsed. So he had retreated then with premolar extractions to show successful results. Following this Charles was nick named “Four on the Floor.”
However many of his cases were only just out of retention. This presentation had a huge impact on American and later, world orthodontics. To start with he was thrown out of the Angle Orthodontic society like both my son and I have been, but following that almost all orthodontists adopted his techniques.
What interests me is that in his later life he almost completely reversed his opinions and would only accept patients in the early mixed dentition saying “Knowledge will gradually replace harsh mechanics”, However most of his followers have continued with fixed appliances.
I was fortunate to have been trained by Willy Grossmann who followed Viggo Andresen’s ‘Functional’ treatment. This again relied more on the activity of the Soft Tissues. My first case went well and I was sold.
It was in 1967 that I heard of Rolf Frankel. I went to Germany to see how he influenced the Soft Tissues with his Buccal Shield and Lip bumper. In many ways it was similar to Andresen’s but neither of them encouraged the mouth to close.
In the 1970s I created my own theory which I called the Tropic Premise saying that malocclusion was a Postural Deformity. To restore natural posture, I designed an appliance based on many others but unlike any of them added lingual ‘Locks’ to train children to keep their mouths closed.
This has proved to be the Missing Link and appears to prevent almost all malocclusion.
