The ALF Appliance How It Works and What It Can Do – Part 1 · 2017-10-30 · The ALF Appliance What It Can Do Darick Nordstrom, DDS The information provided in this presentation

The ALF Appliance

What It Can Do Darick Nordstrom, DDS

The information provided in this presentation is for educational and

informational purposes only

professional medical and/or

condition

qualified health care professional for any questions you may

a medical or dental condition

Scott: Hello, everyone! Welcome back to the Functional Oral Health SummitScott Saunders, President and Cprivilege to be talking with DrALF System of Natural Facial Cognitive Development and Trauma Recoverylooks like an orthodontic appliance but its way more than an orthodontic appliance. ALF standNordstrom developed

He was a groundbreaking pioneer in the area of sleep and airway beginning in 1978. He designed the groundbreaking NS2, also known asthe late 80s, and that became the foundation for many of the current desigsleep appliances that are used todaysleep or airway or any of those thicommonly were even mainstream30 years ahead of his t He's also the co-founder of Interfaceof physicians, dentistpractitioners. They're gearing up a great continuing education websiteyou out there who are practitionersand we will post links to thatpractitioners can join to chat with Darick and his colleaguesDarick Nordstrom to the Functional

Darick: Thank you Scott. This Scott: Great to have you here

audience and with me here todayaudience some basic information on what the ALF or Advanced Light system and appliance is? What it is, w

The ALF Appliance, How It Works and

What It Can Do – Part 1

Darick Nordstrom, DDS


informational purposes only. It is not a substitute for – nor does it provide

professional medical and/or dental advice to diagnosis or treatment any

condition. Always seek the advice of your physician, dentist or other

qualified health care professional for any questions you may

a medical or dental condition.

elcome back to the Functional Oral Health SummitPresident and Co-founder of Healthy Mouth Media

privilege to be talking with Dr. Darick Nordstrom, creator of the Comprehensive System of Natural Facial Cognitive Development and Trauma Recovery

looks like an orthodontic appliance but its way more than an orthodontic ALF stands for Advanced Light Force and this is the system that

Nordstrom developed.

a groundbreaking pioneer in the area of sleep and airway beginning in He designed the groundbreaking NS2, also known as the Dorsal System in

and that became the foundation for many of the current desigsleep appliances that are used today. Keep in mind folks, this wassleep or airway or any of those things that you're starting to hear

even mainstream. So we're talking somebody who was30 years ahead of his time.

founder of Interface, the first hands-on collaborative association of physicians, dentists and complementary− dare I say−functional medicine

hey're gearing up a great continuing education websiteere who are practitioners, you're really going to want to check that out

nd we will post links to that, as well as, the Facebook group that Upractitioners can join to chat with Darick and his colleagues. WelcomeDarick Nordstrom to the Functional Oral Health Summit.

This is exciting to be here with you.

Great to have you here. Thank you for making the time to talk with usaudience and with me here today. So why don't we start out by giving our

some basic information on what the ALF or Advanced Light system and appliance is? What it is, what it does, maybe what it doesn't do

How It Works and


nor does it provide -

advice to diagnosis or treatment any

Always seek the advice of your physician, dentist or other

qualified health care professional for any questions you may have regarding

elcome back to the Functional Oral Health Summit. I am Dr. founder of Healthy Mouth Media. Today is my

Comprehensive System of Natural Facial Cognitive Development and Trauma Recovery. It

looks like an orthodontic appliance but its way more than an orthodontic is the system that Dr.

a groundbreaking pioneer in the area of sleep and airway beginning in the Dorsal System in

and that became the foundation for many of the current designs of this was long before

ngs that you're starting to hear more omebody who was basically

on collaborative association functional medicine

hey're gearing up a great continuing education website. Those of ing to want to check that out

the Facebook group that U.S. Welcome, Dr.

hank you for making the time to talk with us, with our So why don't we start out by giving our

some basic information on what the ALF or Advanced Light Force maybe what it doesn't do?

©2017 Healthy Mouth Media for the Functional Oral Health Summit

There are of course, some caveats that need to be stated in relation to its practical applications and those who practice it and why it's so different from other dental appliances that are available? Why it is so far outside the box when you compare it to conventional orthodontics or dentofacial orthopedics therapy? Importantly, why many of our audience members, practitioners and consumers alike have probably never heard of it and why so comparatively few dentists are using it? I know that’s a mouthful but just some general background for a boatload of audience members and clinicians who are probably not familiar with the ALF system, so a little bit of background I think would be in order.

Darick: Great. Well, if can break that up just a little bit. Scott: Sure. Darick: A little bit of my background. I grew up sailing, and my father had this uncanny

ability to recognize what was going to happen with nature that could have been in a position to be just consistently a winner in all the races but he tried to teach that to us. One of the things we learned was that you had to work with nature. There's just no way in sailing, and he would never let us draw on the motor, that you could get around but you can't force your way in something like that when you're in a sailboat.

So as I headed into dentistry, after saying no to medicine, I felt like-- After my youth leader was, Dr. Gordon Christensen, and he and his wife had inspired me to choose dentistry instead of medicine. It put somewhat of a more whole person background into this approach, and when I first came into practice, the orthodontists would send patients and they wanted me to extract teeth, and it just seemed to be the routine. It’s almost like the teeth need to be extracted before they ever got their first evaluation with the orthodontist. I felt bad about it. I love my patients; they're like family so immediately was thown into a lot of research and practice and began using an oral myofunctional therapist in my office. That got me introduced to osteopathy. We realized that orthodontics is more than the teeth. Just like the finger is connected to the rest of the body, the teeth are connected to the rest of the body and we needed to really treat it as a whole. So I began working in a partnership; that would be fourhanded, six handed, not just talking over the phone, but actually in the same room at the same time with these practitioners giving feedback as we tried to develop an appliance that would address the whole body’s needs. It has been a surprise since day one because as the practitioners soon found out, it did a lot more than straighten teeth. We look at it more as a therapy than as just orthodontics per se. I don't know how far that gets me in this but--So from pretty much day one, actually it was year two, we've been working with complementary practitioners on this and even though a lot of patients were able to do well with just a single practitioner, the best cases are really when there's a teamwork approach.

Scott: That's one of the points that we're really trying to drive home with the

Functional Oral Health Summit, that the interdisciplinary approach is really the only thing that's going to move the needle in the world of functional medicine, dentistry, orofacial myofunctional therapy, and the many stars that you have to have in that particular cast. All this is a fascinating overview. I think what might be helpful for our audience members, Darick is to see some video from an


interview that you had on the Hugh Downs Medical Miracles show a few years back and you gave a very nice summary of what ALF Therapy is all about. Let's watch that video now.

[Start of Video Clip - National Medical Report] Narrator: A person smile, it’s one of the first things many of us notice when meeting

someone. Our smile plays an important part in how we look and feel about ourselves. So important that millions of Americans get braces every year to achieve that beautiful smile. But many don't realize that having straight teeth also plays a major factor in overall health and wellbeing.

Darick: We’re finding that dentistry and proper facial function, correct orientation of the

teeth and the swallow has a much larger role in overall health than people had assumed years ago. This is because of the new information about the interaction of the nervous system related to the jaw. Breathing at night, sleep apnea seems to be strongly related to facial function. Behavioral problems are related to adequate tongue space, speech and hearing. These are things that have been discovered just recently and have really broadened the scope of dentistry as it relates to medicine.

Narrator: While, the medical community has only recently recognized the significant role

dentistry has in overall health. Many dentists realized this truth years ago. Based on this idea and developed with the input of medical doctors, osteopathic physicians and chiropractors, a new treatment appliance called Alternative Light wire Functionals or ALF was designed to not only realign the teeth but also correct distortions in three main regions.

Darick: The three main purposes of the ALF are first, to bring the cranial bones into good

functional motion−balanced motion. The second is to develop the dental arches to align the teeth and the way the jaws function together with enough room for the tongue. And third, it's to bring those together and integrate them into a proper function which would include swallowing, speech and deglutition.

Narrator: Some feel that by rectifying these three areas, the orthodontic appliance can

help relieve chronic pain and remedy some common physical ailments. Darick: What we found with the ALF is not only to help align the teeth and make more

room for the jaw and the tongue, but it brought a balance to the cranial bone motion and brought the tongue into a neutral swallow position. That seems to bring the patient into an autonomic nervous system balance, and at that point, a number of other symptoms seem to go away that were seemingly unrelated, whether they're heart problems or jaw problems, headaches, behavioral problems, all seem to disappear.

Tasha: Patient comes in with a whole variety of symptoms. With the ALF appliance, that

has resolved many symptoms that were unable to be resolved in other ways. There was an eight-year-old boy who came to the office and he was unable to hear over his left ear−75 percent hearing loss. He was also diagnosed the ADHD. Within 24 hours of placement of the ALF appliance, he was able to hear well and at this time, his ADHD was resolved.

Narrator: Although the dental treatment approach has been widely accepted within the


field of dentistry, there is still the challenge of ensuring practitioners have a thorough understanding of how the appliance works.

Tasha: Well, there's a whole variety of symptoms that are related to facial dysfunction

that most practitioners don't know about. So if all practitioners know how to diagnose facial dysfunction and treat it, other symptoms that have been unresolvable in other ways can actually be resolved.

Narrator: Researchers have discovered there is a strong link between oral and overall

health. Renowned dentist, Dr. Darick Nordstrom, has developed a major breakthrough aesthetic appliance that merges the fields of dentistry, medicine and osteopathy.

Darick: The ALF is made of a very light orthodontic wire with three omega loops that

makes it springy. It fits in the mouth right at the gum line where people can barely notice it's there.

Narrator: According to Dr. Nordstrom, the ALF appliance has been shown to produce life

changing results for patients worldwide. Darick: The ALF has produced some pretty miraculous results. I can think of one patient

that was recently in. She had been given up on by one of the world's major teaching hospitals, and came in and with osteopathy and the ALF, she was able to regain her weight and her function going from not eating and going down to 85 lbs. up to normal eating and a full professional life as an artist.

Tasha: The ALF appliance can dramatically change the way physicians and dentists are

practicing. I use it as a tool. As an osteopathic physician, I see a variety of patients with all kinds of symptoms, including autonomic dysfunctions, pain syndromes, sleep issues, behavioral issues, and the ALF appliance has dramatically improved the quality of life in these patients. Physicians and dentists need to get training on how to use the ALF appliance and how to diagnose this facial dysfunction.

Narrator: Dental experts advise patients that have been suffering from chronic pain or

unusual health problems to seek ALF treatment.

Darick: The ALF device and philosophy offer hope where there was nothing before. It’s completely opened up the worlds for our patients and for other patients of the doctors that worked with me. It can open up healing for other patients.

Tasha: You don’t need to live with pain; there is a solution. The ALF appliance's maybe

something that can help you. [End of video clip] Scott: So what is it about the ALF that's so different from other dental appliances and

therapies? What is the basic principle on which it works? We've talked about you know working with nature rather than trying to fight it, which unfortunately is what a big percentage of the orthodontic community is still doing. Can you tell us about the light forces that it applies and how that leads into the total body effects that have been described as miracles. I have to say that I was a little bit skeptical in using the term "miracles" but the more people I talk to about this,


the more apropos that term seems. So how does the ALF work? Darick: Well, my first introduction in looking at orthodontics and the first struggle and

keeping in mind this background with sailing and working with nature, but the tongue was the first thing that we saw that the orthodontists had to fight against was the tongue wanted to do one thing. As we began to look at designing an appliance that would help the tongue do the right thing. Number one, we wanted something that would be super, super small and not in the way of the tongue but one that would direct it. At the same time, working with the osteopaths and realizing that there is motion within the cranial bones (there are natural body functions that connect together), we began to get turned on to this concept of proprioception. We recognized that the tongue really wants to feel certain things in place. The teeth should be in place, the jaw joints and the neck. All of these sort of play together, and so the idea with ALF is to have a minimal presence that's enough to redirect the forces of nature.

So it's a very lightwire appliance that when you first think about it, it's almost like the little inner tube inside of a tire back before we went tubeless. It's a very thin inner tube in a way but yet, it's the thing that gives shape to the tire. So we started looking at it that way, looking at how do we optimize function. We found it by being selective on where we put pressures and where we put the wires, encouraging the tongue to work with the body, and all of a sudden, these things started to come to pass. We'd see dramatic corrections in things-- Probably, the first thing we’d see is the patients or the parents would come back after one month and say, "I know this sounds kind of crazy but my son," like "the next night" or "the night after that," I can't remember they’d say," my son just stopped wetting the bed." Just like that. Just after the appliance when-- I mean is that possible? Or we'd see that their grades. One, the grandmother brings her grandson, and he went from being with detention and deficiencies to being on honor roll. That’s a big, big change in a matter of just a few months. So we realized that there is more than just moving teeth around. It's integrating a lot of neural networks within the body, and a lot of them that we're just learning as we go. Fortunately, a number of years ago, Dr. Steve [Stephen]Porges wrote a book called, Polyvagal Theory, and that actually started to add credibility to the things that we were finding and reporting. I think that might have something to do with some of the miracles that we see.

Scott: That is amazing. I am somewhat familiar with Dr. Porges’s work and you were

actually exploring working with these principles long before that came out. That was a collection of his papers more from an academic standpoint, but before that it seems that you were using these principles to actually get some results and resolving cranial strains and leading to these dramatic improvements, some of which were immediate.

So supporting, stimulating, organizing, and design, can you tell us a little bit about how that interacts with the developing craniofacial structures and importantly, the airway and how that might affect the occurrence, presence or resolution of sleep-disordered breathing, which we’re hearing so much about that nowadays−sleep apnea, sleep-disordered breathing? How does working with those craniofacial forces via the ALF system affect airway and sleep?

Darick: That's a very good question, because we have a number of aspects to it. I think


that airway has been unidirectional for a while. It's just like make as much room as possible, but the reality check, there are two of them. One is what things look like in the office aren't the same as what they're like in the middle of the night; and the other one is that the body is supposed to be able to maintain the airway on its own. So we're either looking at the patient as a failure or we're looking at the patient as needing support. With the ALF, we look at the patient as needing support. So we say, what has not come online yet or what is misguided? What is a maladaptive, but can be helped and guided to get on line?

So one of the things that we find with children early on there's a lot of trauma that’s unresolved, and there are infantile reflex patterns that don't get mature. There are a number of reasons for that and it's too much for a little discussion, but when we first started using ALF and we'd see these miracles and not just me, every practitioner’s had them. When we'd see them, they came before the understanding. I'll frankly say that. We had a foundation based on principles of nature, but the miracles had forced us to look at and explore why, and that's helped us understand the things that are now coming to be confirmed. One of them is this principle of limbic system hyperactivity. What happens is that when our body has had traumas, maybe there has been an abrupt interruption of breathing and the patient's not able to have a normal, deep, slow belly breath, just normal as of not when a baby is born but soon after and especially, with nursing, if those things are missed, that patient will have their sleep interrupted. You can get away with that for a while and then as you get to be an adult, that maladaptive pattern all of a sudden, basically gets you in trouble. So we look at that. We see that when we bring the jaw forward, these patients get better. So the thought was well, it's just bring the jaw forward and get a bigger airway. It sort of works except that part of bringing the jaw forward was taking the patient out of an old trauma pattern. I think people just misunderstood what the benefit was. So when we find that these are neural reflex circuits, then we can reorient our treatment to address the deficiencies, bring the patient to be their best self. The airway and all those start to maintain themselves. It’s really exciting because it's what nature intended in the first place. We're basically saying nature had it right. It's just that it got sidetracked with our environment vs. saying well nature-- I mean whatever it was, totally screwed up and we have to cut it apart and put it back together again. I don't believe in that. We didn’t do that-- Anyway [chuckles].

Scott: So working in concert with nature and getting back to the interdisciplinary

approach, ALF therapy works side by side with osteopaths who are doing perhaps craniofacial manipulation and working as an integrated team member with the patient who was having ALF therapy with the ALF appliance. Can you tell us a little bit about the osteopath connection and how a big piece of what you're doing with ALF is related in the pillars of the foundation of osteopathic therapy?

Darick: That's a very-- Some of the cases that we see with the osteopath giving us

feedback, we're able to find triggers and things that have come out of balance. Remember that there are nerves within the sutures around the teeth. There are nerves associate with the tongue and the fascia from the tongue connects all the way into the diaphragm and all the way over to the gut, too. The same thing


goes with the neck and so with the osteopathic sense, we're able to not only bring people to neutral, but the osteopath can give us feedback on traumas, many that are unresolved. There are children that have had a trauma. One that just comes to mind is a young man that we saw in consultation and the jaw wasn't moving as would be expected and there were few other things. I, as we're feeling osteopathically, and in checking, it became clear that he had had a traumatic incident. If you don’t mind, I will just as quickly as possible tell you what the traumatic incident is.

Scott: Sure, that's fine. Darick: They were two brothers. He’s the older brother and he was still quite young, but

his little brother is a toddler walk in front of the swing as he was in full swing, the older brother. As a caring, loving older brother, he tried to stop himself, ended up flipping off the swing and hitting his head with a massive whack on concrete. Not on some sand, but it ended up on concrete. That's how he was able to stop his swing and avoid hitting his brother. If we think that we're going to be able to just go to what we see which is the jaw and not resolve these underlying traumas that have pulled the jaw back, because he's been stuck in that trauma. I mean this is a loving older brother that got stuck in this trauma that was unresolved. So we work with the ALF to help work through that trauma and then nature unfolds itself and in most cases, is able to catch up miraculously. Not always all the way catch up, but miraculously catch up. That's so much easier than basically saying to nature, “Oh, you know, you totally screwed up. We know better than you and we're going to do it this way.” That doesn’t seem to… We don't get the miracles that way.

Scott: Yes. So let’s stay with your example for a minute and move into how these

neural reflexes are involved. You talked about these nerve supplies that are so frequently overlooked and the sutures between the bones of the skull and in the alveolar process where the teeth and the jaws come together. We're talking about a lot of potential, I know trigger point is not an accurate term, but talking about a lot of different points where trauma can land and have profound implications and about essentially reprogramming some of these reflexes, some which have had to do with swallowing and probably with what happens to the airway during consciousness as well as sleep, can you tell us in the context of the example of the two brothers, how the ALF system can help get those reflexes back on track and I don't know if reprogramming would be an accurate term, but maybe in that context, how would it do that?

Darick: Yes. Well, getting it back on track is yes, because he probably was developing

pretty normally until that happened. So now you have a concussion and your brain is in this position of trying to put the pieces together. That's what we do before we can ever fully go to sleep. That happens in two stages, both REM and in deep sleep. Deep sleep is more muscle memory and interpretation; REM is more situational.

So what we find is if you consider the way the body developed embryologically, the first muscle developed was the heart and the second muscle was the tongue. These two pumping type muscles, the tongue and the heart, are part of this correctional or recovery that the body has. So you have heart, tongue and respiration. The tongue, swallow and breathe, when done properly, are what were built to use for a reset for our body. So when we're able to do that, if the


bones of the cranium are not stuck and we're able to get this nice lift from the tongue, a swallow and there's deep breath, the body recovers. The best example we have of that is cats. Cats can fall from a number of stories up and they can survive. What research has shown is that if the cat can purr after it has slatted on the ground, it will recover. We look at the human and say, if we can help the person go from the trauma swallow, which is where the tongue is just like stuck in the middle and just frozen. If we can encourage the tongue to go to the roof of the mouth, breathe through the nose, it’s like a reset to the body. It just begins this unfolding process.

With the ALF, what happens is in a trauma case, you might be able in the office, you help someone swallow that way but as soon as they go out into real life and have another trauma that's in any way associated, they forget. But with the ALF in, it's a constant reminder and a support to help them again and again and again do that reset. Then it starts to be like, "Oh, this is normal" and this whole unfolding or unwinding recovery starts to occur. It’s natural. It’s what it's supposed to be.

Scott: Yes. So it's helping nature do its job. Nature, of course, responds to trauma by

helping to reprogram us or help our bodies reprogram ourselves. The ALF is just kind of a helping hand to that, it seems. Now, I think it's an important point to make. The ALF appliance is generally, permanently cemented?

Darick: Well, it fits so well, whether it's cemented or slipped in. We have three versions.

There’s one that's actually cemented and it’s barely there and then we have one that snaps on but generally, kids just sleep and adults just sleep with it on. There's one that slips in. It's mostly like a snowshoe effect. They're light. They shouldn’t be overly rigid because we want them to interact with the body. That’s that stimulation, and we don't want them to crowd the body out, but to enhance the sensations.

It’s interesting when you think of a dog before they go to sleep. They generally circle in their little bed area that they're going to create. They go around and they sleep. Well, our body does that routinely through the day. We do a check. We pull all the different parts in our mouth. Is everything in place? It is in place. Oh, good. I can go to sleep. So if we can help this feel familiar to the patient, then they're able to actually go into sleep and stay asleep. Sometimes it involves support to the jaw with what’s called the "Omni" which has some plastic on it to help guide the jaw, but in most cases it's something very simple that just allows the body to say, “Oh, that feels right, and I'm going to be okay.”

Scott: Okay. So staying with this for a moment, I'm going to take a leap here. I'm not

sure how much hard research or data might exist to support this, but are we working in context? You're talking about the heart, the tongue and some of these reflexes that are age-old dating back to embryologic development. Are we talking about involvement of the vagus nerve here in some of this reprogramming? The vagus nerve, of course, being one of the cranial nerves that comes out of the head and it has a lot to do with, among other things, the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems or the autonomic nervous system. So what evidence do we have that the vagus nerve is involved in some of this programming, and bringing in Stephen Porges' research on the Polyvagal Theory, how much do we know about that?


Darick: Well, one of our early confirmations of that and I feel that it is more than the

vagus, but we have a few critical ones. If you consider some of the earliest nerves to develop, it was the trigeminal of course was, then there's III, V, VII, IX. If you take X, which is vagus and you take hypoglossal, they're the only cranial nerves that extend all the way at least down into the pelvis and they seem to-- When we began treating patients or adult patients, we have patients that were declared infertile. Our first one was actually would have three miscarriages for one complete pregnancy, and immediately afterwards, she had three complete pregnancies and no miscarriages ever again. After the three, they're done but--

Scott: So after ALF therapy is what you're talking about? Darick: Yes. Well, actually, soon into getting started. Some of them, it has taken years.

It depends on how, I guess you could say, infertile they are, but these are patients with lots of interventions that were not successful. The reason I bring that up, there's a confirmation. It's just with polyvagal theory, we see there's a credibility and research there and this has now become accepted. At the time we were first observing it, we're saying well, what is the mechanism? It actually became pretty predictable. I don't know if we've had one that was not successful as they went through treatment, but even though the first one was done with no osteopathic intervention, I would prefer anytime because the clock is ticking. All of the subsequent ones have been with osteopathy coordinating this together, making sure that that patient’s body fully comes online as quickly as possible.

Scott: So you could have the osteopathic intervention dealing with some of the

imbalances that might exist in the pelvis, sacrum or perhaps lumbar spine, all of the neural pathways that might have a bearing on, not only infertility but other trauma that might be imposed by accidents might affect the opposite end of the spine from the head. Is that a fair statement?

Darick: That’s excellent because the osteopath has been able to identify old traumas

that just like you say, have been interrelated. So it's not just a matter of let's just go for the vagus. Let’s look at this whole pattern and work through and resolve them. In some of them, it's peeling layers off an onion. I mean we work on some of the issues and as they evolve, there's a point where it's a breakthrough, and it's exciting.

Scott: Definitely. We hear a concept called heart rate variability being spoken of.

You’ve dwelt heavily on that in some of the discussions that you and I have had. First of all, can you define what this concept of heart rate variability is both from the point of diagnosis as well as treatment and how it interweaves or dovetails with these neural pathways that we're talking about that are affected by the ALF?

Darick: With the heart rate variability, ages ago before the anesthesiologist started

noticing this, the assumption was the more steady our heartbeat was the better. The anesthesiologists, as they're listening through a whole surgery, began to listen and hear this cadences that patients had and they've started relating them. That's what led us to discover a lot of the heart rate variability research. What we find is that the broader this spectrum of variability, it's generally associated with a greater level of health and a high-frequency meaning more


variability − a high frequency heart rate variability. That component is generally associated with better parasympathetic tone.

In our world where we're trauma-based and just driven, getting the parasympathetic nervous system to a balance point and allowing the sympathetic to quiet down is really a good component of our goal because what we found overtime was that when we were treating adults, if they were sympathetically overdriven, we couldn't get the same quality bone growth because not only do they not digest as well, but they didn't sleep. All of the things that would get the growth hormones to allow them to remodel their bone, those were dramatically lower when they're sympathetically overdriven. Of course, there's genetics and things like that.

So we start looking at the heart rate variability to help us stage treatment phases because if someone's healthy, we can go right into arch development, if that’s the right thing but if someone is showing that they have this sympathetic overdrive and are not responding on the parasympathetic nervous system, we can redirect the ALF and the treatment to resolve these unresolved traumas or misinterpreted life events or incompletely matured infantile reflexes. It helped us to stage treatment so we were less likely to have a surprise which would be if someone launches a treatment and the patient's body wasn't really ready for. It’s fun to watch it. There were times we put the ALF in and the Omni perhaps on the bottom and it’s just like right there. Within moments, there's a big change and the patients can usually feel it. They don't really need the confirmation but it's nice to see this shift and then be able to say, "Okay, we're on it." We're maintaining that and then watch the body change. So it was part of this exploration to understand why some people responded differently than others. It's so simple, and it’s non-evasive. Hopefully, someday it'll be like in every office.

Scott: One would hope. So if I'm understanding you correctly, what we're seeing is a

lot of people who are, in relation to trauma and stress you say, sympathetically overdriven. Now, the sympathetic nervous system is the one that is intimately associated with the fight, flight or freeze response. The classic example of the primal human being chased by the proverbial saber-toothed tiger and the sympathetic arm of the autonomic nervous system, of course, is a lifesaver there but I think what has been, if I'm understanding what you’re saying correctly, in the stress-driven social cultural world that we have now, what is being overlooked (except for the people who are achieving it through exercise, meditation, mindfulness or whatever) is the other arm of the autonomic nervous system known as the parasympathetic system whose job it is to calm down. Once we're breathing normally, our heart slows down. We've gotten into that place of safety that we recapture what nature probably intended to be a baseline of calm, centering, safety and getting into a place where they can reinterpret the old trauma, maybe reengage the prefrontal cortex and take the limbic system, amygdala and all that out of gear, get out of the fight, flight or freeze response and get into a place where there is centering, calm and relaxation. You've seen that the ALF has had some very significant results in that regard. Is that correct?

Darick: Yes. Watching the children are probably the most dramatic. Obviously, in the

adults like we're talking about but the children, whether it's autism or attention deficits and cerebral palsy, we're looking at these things. These kids respond because it allows them to, like you say move the information which is stuck in


the limbic system. They get to move it into the neocortex, get to categorize it and move on. It just stays there until it's fully interpreted because the body is saying, "Well, it's got to be right there at hand because there might be something happened again." So once we're able to help them find, what we call a midline, where that tongue starts to move correctly and the cranial bones start to move when the tongue swallows. All that rhythm begins. Again, the peristalsis which is this moving up and down the esophagus in the gut tube. When these things start to come on board, ah then the body can say, “Oh, I now have a chance to interpret these events, move on and gain wisdom from them rather than be just in the excitement mode." I think that's part of why the kids start sleeping better and their grades get better so rapidly, because kids recover quickly. Once their sleep is healthy again and their brain doesn't have to be charged up, if it get the chance to look at things with almost like a wisdom which you see before kids get traumatized. When they’re really young they go like, "Wow! You're so smart."

Scott: Yes, like a miniature. Even more a miniature Yoda, I've heard that term used. So

what we're seeing now, we’re hearing a lot about the field of energy medicine. We're hearing a lot about Emotional Freedom Techniques [EFT], although you hear that term being used less frequently now. It’s going more commonly known as Tapping. We see the tapping points, the meridian tapping and this field is going by the name of energy medicine. I can tell you through personal experience, using it with my own past and my own trauma that it is very effective. What's happening is that we're tapping on energy meridians that are going through the body and there is more and more scientific evidence that these pathways are scientifically measurable; some real cutting-edge research in the last couple of years.

This is talking about the field of energy medicine, and basically tapping on these points to relieve, to deprogram trauma that is stored, not only in the nervous system, but in every cell in the body. It strikes me that the forces being applied by the ALF system on the craniofacial bone structures and all of these neural reflex circuits might just have something in common with this energy medicine, which to give a little background is based on the early work of the late great Dr. Roger Callahan who pioneered what was called, "Thought Field Therapy" which is a slightly more complex version of Emotional Freedom Techniques, TFT which led into EFT building on the work, not only of Callahan but Gary Craig afterwards; and the person who picked up the ball and ran with it when unfortunately, Gary became indisposed (he had a heart attack), one of our other speakers, Dr. Dawson Church, the Founder and Head of EFT Universe and a true pioneer in the field of clinical EFT, he’s done all sorts of work with trauma including heavy duty combat trauma to relieve these symptoms of PTSD, not only from combat but from everyday garden-variety trauma which can be just as devastating. Can you speak a little bit to any commonality of that energy medicine, tapping and EFT going back to the early work of Callahan might have in common with the forces that are being applied through the system of ALF therapy on the craniofacial structures and really on every cell in the body actually.

Darick: That's great. I guess I can say I was fortunate the dental school I went to, USC,

taught acupuncture. My last two years, I had courses in acupuncture and so I was primed for this and also with sailing. We're looking at these light forces and it’s a matter of understanding this.


So having the power that we saw with acupuncture-- My first dramatic case with acupuncture was in dental school. One of the dental students came and he said, "Man, I've been constipated for a long, long time and I don't know where I'm going to go. What can you do?" I don't know why it was that he came to me but anyway, I put him up on the lab table, put an acupuncture needle in the spot associated with that, and I just kind of worked in that needle a little bit, getting it right to where I think it's going to work and he says, "Stop right there. Stop. Stop. Right there." I said, what do you mean? He says, "If you don't stop right there, it's going to be all over the table."

Scott: Ohhh. Darick: So he hopped off of the table, grabbed his rear and went off to the bathroom. It

was cleared. That was a conversion point. I think we all have those in our lives. So, that primed me to be excited when I saw… I'd learned about Roger Callahan and then ultimately, Gary Craig and being able to learn and utilize these techniques, because we're looking at these points. The first person I know that really proved this was a doctor who is now gone, but he was at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and his name was Bjorn Nordenstrom. He was the Nobel Prize committee chairperson for the Medical Nobel Prize. He found and published two books that basically confirmed with the electron microscopy the existence of energy meridians. So that added some more credibility to this but we're seeing these dramatic changes.

It's interesting what happens with Thought Field Therapy (EFT). What we are doing I believe, if we tap on some of these points that are naturally linked into the brain, they help take us out of endless loops, so to speak, that keep us stuck in old trauma patterns. When we put the ALF in and it puts these light forces, the body's saying something is different here and it seems to be able to be receptive. So one of the adept pediatric dentist and the pediatric orthodontist anyway in California, what she found is her children that would come and get ALF, the parents would ask for ALF. For a while, she helped provide that for them, but as they got the ALF, they would start having these emotional releases and recoveries. She was like, "I'm really not ready for that. I love treating the kids but--" This is not an uncommon thing. It's easier for the kids because they just reorganize so quickly, but for the adults, these patterns are so developed. They need help, and EFT and especially with someone that has that training, and ideally with the understanding about breathing and how critical that is. When you put those together, people are able to move through these old traumas and get back on track. Their body gets on track. PTSD is a big deal but I'd like to put a little plug-in for this one. There are kids that come in and their tongues are pretty much stuck in a way, and they're just stalled. Before they get any surgical intervention, we want to treat the parents. If the parents can be treated with EFT, even if not with ALF, but just with EFT, a lot of times when the release happens on the parent, the child releases. We find that some of this rigidity that the child has that seems like a tether, there are many true tethers that need to be surgically released, but many of them go away when the parent's trauma is resolved with the energy medicine−the EFT and some of the very similar approaches. They're definitely interrelated, and it's a great field to be a part of. It's definitely working with nature and not trying to fight against it.


Scott: That is amazing. Particularly important, as you say with the child patient and some practitioners, I guess still overlook the fact that the parent or parents are integral members of that interdisciplinary team, because they're spending, in some cases, close to 24/7 with that kid and if they're carrying around their own trauma, the kids are certainly going to be picking up on that. Isn't that right?

Darick: Oh, man. Do they ever? That's how we learn. It’s fun for me to watch my

grandkids as they grow up because we learn through patterning. There's a mentoring program. It's called parents and siblings.

Scott: So what ALF, EFT and meridian tapping enables us to do is bypass the

programming overlay that we have through the more stressful cultural, daily life pattern that we learn in parallel and sometimes as an overlay to trauma. You've described this, in conjunction with the ALF itself, as a constant reset integrator to help reset the healthy swallow and to foster good nasal breathing and proper tongue positioning on the palate. Can you speak a little bit about the reset integrator concept that you see with the ALF?

Darick: Well, having the osteopath on board, it's almost like the secret, because when

they're holding the patient's head and we put the ALF in and they feel what happens, they can describe to me, "Oh, wow! This just happened. This just happened. This just happened." So when we see that chain of events, it confirm because all we can do is sort of guess before we can say well, it looks like this is appearing and here’s the osteopath saying, "Wow! The tongue went up. The mid-face started to open up. There's a midline here. The brain is starting to function; now it's calmed in. The diaphragm was dropping. Everything is working." We see this unfolding.

So it's a pretty intimate observation. It was actually happening. I wouldn't say it’s like an educated guess anymore. This is a pretty recurring theme as these practitioners feel what happens. Even in cases like cleft palates where there've been surgeries; the nerves aren't always in exactly the right spot or other cases where things had been rearranged. The process still works and it allows the body to have what we call "a healthy neuroplasticity" because neuroplasticity can go either way. So this allows like a healthy neuroplasticity of this positive remodeling of like it turns trauma into wisdom and experience positive experience instead of stalling someone. It shows us that this is the body's natural pattern, and it starts at birth with nursing and that suckle-swallow, suckle-suckle-suckle-swallow, that kind of beginning point and then the breathing through the nose. The baby before even nursing, there is this checking in with mother's heartbeat. All of these things happen so subtly, and in our society we just kind of forget about that. A lot of times then, when someone has trauma, it's very, very hard to recover from the trauma because these are how the body is programmed to recover. It's from day one. We just get more sophisticated as we get older, but the core principles are the same. So when someone has trauma, we don't know how far we have to fall back to, but we fall back to a point where the body says, "Ah, I remember that. That's my sound footing, and I'm going to start working my way back into health from there. "You just can't sidestep it and say, "Okay, well forget all about that pass. We're going to cut you and put you together and immediately, you're going to be better because you look right."


Scott: Right, which unfortunately is still to this day, a major focus of the orthodontic community at large. We’ve got people speaking here on the Functional Oral Health Summit who are addressing all these things that we're talking about, Darick, from the orthodontic , oral myofunctional therapeutic, nose breathing, and breastfeeding-lactation standpoint. We have got some really heavy hitting experts. So folks, you're going to want to check them out as well, because they are dovetailing very nicely with what Darick is saying about all of these things, and how these are basically, the body's bag of tricks that it learns and falls back on and is in some cases, naturally programmed to do.

Unfortunately, what mainstream orthodontics still does is measure everything with how you look and do you, or do you not have straight teeth, when the underlying structure and energy pattern is really what we need to be focusing on. That's one of the key messages that we're sending here. In regard to energy medicine or EFT or Tapping, it dovetails very nicely with one of our other speakers on the Summit, Dr. Dawson Church, whom I alluded to earlier is going to be telling you about. Actually, you will see him tapping with me in his talk here on the Summit. Diving deeper into what energy medicine can do to deprogram and reprogram trauma, and as you said a few moments ago, help the person move on. Just basically put that trauma in its place, remember it but not have it be a perpetual trigger for the amygdala, the limbic system, and just put it where it needs to be so you can move on with your life. Now, you mentioned the term neuroplasticity before. Neuroplasticity, as I understand it, is the ability of the nervous system to reorganize its pattern and to-- I’m picturing the saying that the nerve pathways that fire together, wire together and that the nervous system actually has the ability to reorganize itself, both in response to trauma and in response to healing or reprogramming a trauma. Can you speak a little bit about the concept of neuroplasticity and how you understand it, maybe in the context of what you do with ALF therapy?

Darick: Sure. What I'd like to do just preface with the research that has just been

published which basically shows that in dementia, what is known as the cognitive reserve and sleep are the biggest things that reduce the bad effect of brain aging. So what is cognitive reserve and what does that have to do with neuroplasticity? What I see as cognitive reserve, it's generally been interpreted as, well how many years did you go to school. Well, that has been disproven but it's what do you do with your body. If you're in a problem solving mode through your life, even if you're an auto mechanic, you’re creatively problem solving or whatever that profession is. When you've creatively problem solving and not into a zombie mode, when you have problems neurologically, whether it’s brain trauma, accident, may even hypoxia, maybe you have a little bit of apnea, you have the ability for your brain to say, "I am familiar with these patterns because I had so many of them to choose from" and it will use those patterns as a map to help remap the lost areas.

So the neuroplasticity depends a lot on the foundation of the brain. When we look at children, when children have learned to write in cursive for example, which is not routinely taught in school anymore, they have this nice, broad movement, fine motor skills. When they develop and learn to do that instead of typing on a keyboard, that is part of what we call a cognitive reserve. These children have a better chance of having a healthy neuroplasticity if they have


some brain trauma. So what we want to see when someone has a trauma and how they're going to recover with neuroplasticity is when they have a trauma, number one, what is their cognitive reserve? How many things do they have that give them this broad, broad foundation to reach into to say, "Oh, I'm familiar with that. We can use that as a building part to recover." So that's one of them. The other one is your support network that's outside the person. With that support network, like ALF for example, osteopathy, speech therapy, swallowing therapy, someone that has a lot of experience with thought field therapy that recognizes these things and is familiar with post-traumatic stress, all of these can help the brain to see, "Oh, if I can do this, I can get from here to here.” So sometimes, the brain can't draw from its own resources and when we put some support in that goes like, "Oh, now I can see. I can make this little jump and then things come into place." When the body can't make the jump, the neuroplasticity says, "I'm going to try to find something else." The classic one for that is tinnitus, for example−ringing in the ears. When there is some aggressive or loud noise or some other jaw or facial-related trauma, the body can either say, "Oh, wow! I'm going to reorient myself around this, and I'll be okay" or "It can stay in this excitable mode" because it has a poor choice of neuroplasticity. What we want to do is we want to help our children develop, as much as they should, all of these neural reflexes that are supposed to be part of growing up and many of which are lost in our current system of growth and school, like cursive. And then, we want to provide the support. So the body goes like. "Oh, well you just took the relief off of that. So now I have a chance see more clearly the pathway to putting these pieces back together again." So a patient like that won't get tinnitus. We find the same thing as with Parkinsonism. Some of the things that we would never think are related or finding that they're interrelated, and it's because of having structure and function, not just the appearance of, but structure, function and neural reflex patterns. All of these are in place, the body goes like, "Oh, I can fall back on that because I can see its right there and these patients recover quickly." But the patients that don't have those to fall back on, they don’t recover quickly or they'd get like tinnitus which should be an improper response, where the body just stays and creates that noise

Scott: So once again, we see a mouth as kind of a handle to the rest of the body and

when you're applying these light forces, the craniofacial structures through the ALF system, you're creating that stimulus for good neurplasticity. Again, you're gravitating back more toward that parasympathetic tone and away from the nervous fight, flight or freeze sympathetic tone into that safe place where the neuroplasticity can occur in a positive direction and the nervous system can basically reprogram itself.

I'd like to pick up on one of the things that you talk about. You've talked about dementia. We’ve also heard some pretty amazing stories, some of these miracles as they're often described with ALF therapy on patients who are on the autism spectrum, who have Tourette’s which not uncommonly occurs in people on the autism spectrum. How can the ALF help patients like this? Can you share maybe some of the dramatic effects that ALF practitioners routinely see in


people with autism, Tourette's, even dementia, Parkinson's and things like that? Darick: Yes. With autism, one of the common findings, I think it's universal, is that the

corpus callosum which connects the right hemisphere with the left hemisphere in the brain, and that allows us to say, "Okay, we have the mechanical outside world. We have the inside interpretation." That is as much as 30 percent smaller. So that information highway is restricted. When we can unburden that and allow that patient to have these familiar sensations, what the body planned in the first place−what's supposed to be there. These people who are absolutely brilliant, when they're not overwhelmed, have a chance to have that quiet and the interpretation of the signals, they're not trying to run too many things through that corpus callosum. So this seems the centering effect or finding a midline, at the same time quieting some of the sympathetic overdrive.

So we find that these kids are not so hyperexcitable with sounds and all of these things that are disturbing. The tongue goes to the roof of the mouth. There’s a quietability to just almost for them for the first time in their life to be able to decide how they're going to react. I mean how many kids just can't tolerate the tag in the back of their shirt? In fact, most of the shirts now are printed instead of having a tag because it's hard for many children to tolerate it. That inhibition, and this is one of those cases where inhibition is not a bad thing. That inhibition happens when the body says, "Oh, here is a signal. How do you want to respond to it?" Whereas, with autism and all along on that spectrum, there is, "Here’s a signal and you’re going to respond this way." The patient doesn't have the ability to decide in the neocortex where they're going to go with it. So when we see with ALF in, there's almost a raising level to where the patient is able to decide how to interpret and process those signals as they come through. With that, they can choose not to be disturbed in. So you don't have 25 signals coming through and just overwhelming them. They’re having those signals and their body is saying, "Okay, I don't have to pay attention to that one, that one and that one. I'm just going to pay attention to this one. So I can actually look you straight in the eyes, and I can talk to you and listen to your emotions and not be overwhelmed by it."

Scott: So taking the response out of the realm of the bad or downside of

neuroplasticity and bringing the patient more into the realm of being able to sort out those signals. Maybe, have the two hemispheres talk to each other a little bit more efficiently and be able to deal with things on more of a competent emotional level, rather than having 50,000 signals constantly triggering the amygdala. It's no wonder why so many people with autism are routinely and sometimes, unpredictably going off the deep end. That's the bad side of neuroplasticity; whereas, ALF therapy tends to bring them more toward the positive side of neuroplasticity. Is that a fair statement?

Darick: Yes. We're still learning. It's an exciting field because we love these kids and

well, now they’re becoming adults. It is becoming so prevalent it's forcing us into it so we're learning as fast as we possibly can. The teamwork really makes a big difference because you don't have one person overwhelmed trying to figure this out, and you also have four eyes, six eyes and ears, all of this working and listening to this patient. You have the support of them also. Supporting and creating a safe space for these child or young adult to now begin to create a response.


` When a baby gets potty trained, that becomes a learned response, but when a

child is overwhelmed with so many things happening at once, they're not able to learn that response. So when we create this safe environment, they're able to decide how to sort out these signals and say, "Okay, this is how I'm going to respond." It's just cumulative as it goes but it's a worthy investment basically from early on because they become that independent and strong. We get to see the brilliance come through and the power that comes with that personality.

Scott: So really, what we're talking about in a broader context, Darick, is an epigenetic

reprogramming that's taking place, and the ALF seems to be an integral part of that. We hear from some experts,(not coincidentally some of whom are doing research in energy medicine, EFT and some of the other disciplines that we talked about)talking about what percentage is nature that is the genetic hand that you're dealt. According to most of the research that's beginning to accumulate, more importantly the information that is coming into every cell in your body through the environmental stimuli (that are coming at you as part of your daily life) and how that is affecting this overlay of your DNA (for lack of a better term) and creating stimuli that help to turn off bad genes that might be having a harmful effect or turn on genes that could have more of a beneficial effect or unfortunately, again we have the downside of epigenetics. Harmful environmental stimuli can of course have the opposite effect and that would be in the realm of ongoing trauma that would have to be deprogrammed later on. But from the standpoint of epigenetics, is there any research to indicate that ALF would have a positive effect on this or maybe, just from a clinical standpoint, is ALF therapy a good-- Is it a fair statement to say that ALF therapy creates a positive epigenetic influence on the body that's trying to recover from trauma?

Darick: Yes. I think that when you look at the way that epigenetics unfolds and the way

that-- One of the first things we did with ALF, so we think about how ALF interacts with this potential for epigenetics going either way, of course. One of the first things we encountered was the ability to get bone to move with teeth as we closed clefts. So we had cleft palate patients. The real take home story was the patient, Will.

We had been able to move teeth across clefts and get the bone to go with the teeth. So when we sent him in to get the final lip revision, they always felt they're going through the team. The orthodontist on the team, just part of the team, and I'm sure well-trained within that team approach, was the first person encounter of the family. The orthodontist says, "Well, take your flipper out," meaning your false tooth, assuming that the tooth had been lost like it has occurred all along in every cleft palate case up until then. He said, "Well, I don't have one." He says, "Well, then the tooth is probably just dangling there." They haven’t seen the original cleft X- rays. The parents said, "Well, the dentist said that you might want to take an X-ray because it might surprise you that there's bone around it. So he took the X-ray and stomped out, because there was bone around this. The plastic surgeon came in and said, "This is great. I don't really need to do anything more. Are you happy?" "Actually, we're happy. It's just that the dentist sent us back." He says, "Well, I'm not sure I can improve that much more on what you have." So he's now gone-- He’s in his 40s so when you think about it, here's someone that was treated and told that teeth we're going to be lost, the face would be


underdeveloped and they would need multiple surgeries and with very few surgeries, but with this slow gentle dental approach, in this case with the ALF, we were able to turn on this genetic potential and grow. One of the goals with ALF was to make it so small that when you had an adult, where you basically see these growth potential done that we might be able to get some of it to turn on. We do see some of the turn on and we'll show one of the cases at the very end of someone where we see that turn on. It required making something that was so comfortable the patients wouldn't be offended by it and something that would continue triggering this epigenetic response. But epigenetics takes time. It isn't an overnight thing if you wanted to go against the mode that it's been in. So the ALF being so light and small has allowed us to have this steady, steady influence in some cases where it can't go fast because there's nothing there to work with. We have cases where we've got big gaps in the bone from cleft palates and with this gentle, steady, centered functional approach, we're seeing stuff grow in and fill in. That’s just a couple of examples.

Scott: So in the example that you just described, you're talking about a patient who

was told by some of his practitioners that he might have to have surgery on his palate to fill in the bone that simply was not there because of a cleft palate, but with ALF therapy, he was able to take advantage of the positive epigenetic influence and turn on whatever genes needed to be turned on to fill in that bone spontaneously. As a result, he did not need surgical intervention to close the bony portion of his cleft. Am I understanding that correctly?

Darick: Yes. The first pioneer to demonstrate this was Dr. Dave Singh that found that if

you could create the right environment-- if you didn't do surgery on the cleft palate kids, so it have to be a third world country, but you created a healthy environment, the swallow, nasal breathing and everything, that the cleft would start to grow over. What we did was say okay, we lost that because the patient had surgery. So ideally, we would say just close up the soft stuff but don't try to pull the bone across and then it's a little bit easier for us to do our work. But in this case, we needed to turn on an epigenetic approach that was not as familiar with nature and it had to be something that could occur slowly, gently. So he was able to keep his teeth, teeth he was told he'd be losing and he would need bridgework. He's able to keep the teeth, the teeth brought the bone with them in a positive way. They didn't move out of the bone; they brought bone with them. That’s that epigenetic effect.

Scott: That’s amazing. Keep your eyes open for that folks because you're going to be

hearing more and more about epigenetic effects, not only here on the Functional Oral Health Summit, but as you continue to, as we urge you to do, do your own research. That is a growing field to be sure. There are new medical journals coming up every day that talk about the fields of epigenetics and epigenomics. It's becoming a very, very robustly studied scientific field.

[Continued in Part 2]

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The ALF Appliance How It Works and What It Can Do – Part 1 · 2017-10-30 · The ALF Appliance What It Can Do Darick Nordstrom, DDS The information provided in this presentation