FroggyMouth is a removable device used to correct swallowing defects in children and adolescents. The device was created by French specialist Dr. Patrick Fellus who is a Nobel Prize winner in medicine in 2000. The concept of FroggyMouth has been tested successfully in 2006 at a Hospital in Paris. FroggyMouth is a light and non-binding functional device designed to correct swallowing defects in children and adolescents. His goal is to get a relaxed position of the upper and lower lips. The absence of a bi-labial contact prohibits any possibility of producing a negative pressure inside the oral cavity and, consequently, the use of swallowing suction when the child swallows his saliva.
This happens naturally in young children since 60% of four-year-olds spontaneously discovered this new program. This is the sample in which we find the 50% of children not requiring orthodontic treatment. FroggyMouth is easy to use, minimally invasive and inexpensive. Its natural learning principle is based on the disconnection of lips / language synchinesia.
How it works ? Like a computer program!
A metaphor of Dr. Fellus helps to better understand the engrammation process:
“When we buy a computer some programs are already registered and allow immediate use of it. This is what happens at birth. The child lived in an aquatic environment at a constant temperature and fed continuously.
He is suddenly forced to breathe in an air environment and the food is cut off. Fortunately he has been training for weeks in swallowing amniotic fluid, to establish a functional unit that will allow him in the first minutes of his existence to discover the breast and to meet his nutritional needs.
The mouth being devoid of teeth, the tongue completely fills the oral cavity and makes contact between the lateral part of the latter and the cheeks, and the anterior part with the labial mucosa. But from the moment when the dental system is put in place, must appear the chewing and the dentition of milk which will delimit two territories:
- that of the tongue (the palace)
- that of the labio-juguale mucosa
This is an insurmountable border as soon as the teeth are in occlusion and the activity of the seventeen muscles constituting the tongue will allow optimal stimulation of the anteroposterior and transverse growth of the maxillae. But when suction swallowing persists, it causes skeletal disorders variable in the three senses of space”.
While there is a new, much more sophisticated and comfortable swallowing program since the age of three or four, the child continues to use the old one. It will therefore be necessary to install this new program in the computer, which the practitioner will do during a series of codified exercises. But just like for the computer, it is difficult to completely erase a program from the hard drive. The only way you can not use the old program is to not double-click the icon of the newly installed program.
The icon of the old program is: I have contracted lips, the icon of the new program is: my lips are relaxed and the bottom teeth are touching. If at the time when the child will have to swallow his saliva, the lips are contracted by the activity of the facial nerve, it is automatically the old program that will be used because it is still defined by default. It will happen every minute. If at the time of swallowing the saliva the lips are relaxed against and the teeth clenched under the control of the twin, then it is the right program that will unfold. The treatment process is fast and has a short duration. All the patient needs to do is use the device for 15 minutes a day. This can be done while doing some other activity too, the change in the swallowing pattern occurs subconsciously. FroggyMouth can be used easily and guarantees best results.
FroggyMouth is therefore an installer of the new program, which besides initiating it, will take care of defining it by default so that it is an automatism to use it every minute of the day for the patient.
You will be able to obtain additional information according to your profession: orthodontists, speech therapists and osteopaths (available soon).
Go to www.froggymouth.com for further information.
