It is with tremendous sadness and even greater boredom I have to declare that over the past couple of decades we have been witnessing the rebirth of gnathology and, in particular, orthodontic gnathology.

Gnathology first came into being about one hundred years ago in the US. The main premise of this pseudoscience was an idea that there is some correct position of the condyles inside the glenoid fossae and by reaching this sacred position, the patient will be forever cured of any temporomandibular disorders. For about half a decade since then, gnathologists had been arguing which particular codylar position should be defined as “ideal”.

However, after the introduction of CBCT and MRI in the mid 1980s that helped us to visualise the temporomandibular joint, we soon learned that the position and morphology of the condyles in healthy individuals are highly variable. For a while it seemed that the popularity of gnathology started to vanish… Until a chain of major geopolitical events happened. 

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and further dissolution of the USSR in 1991 opened a vast land of opportunities for gnathologic “gurus”. Starting from the late 1990s – early 2000s the proponents of the discredited science would travel regularly to the “Wild East” selling courses to a gullible and ignorant post-Soviet audience. This resulted in the new wave of popularity of gnathology coming now from Eastern Europe. As their American predecessors, neo-gnathologists now claim that patients should be routinely given oral appliances as the first phase of treatment to “deprogram” muscles and put the condyles into a certain position. They sell courses on how to produce such appliances and encourage patients to undergo this unscientific and potentially hazardous “treatment”. They actively promote this “philosophy” on the internet and across social networks. They also tend to deny the results of scientific studies claiming that all studies are flawed.

I recently came across a well-written article published just two months ago which in a scientific manner confronts these nonsensical claims of neo-gnathologists. I think every orthodontist who is interested in evidence-based care should read and analyse it for oneself. Surprisingly, this article is not protected by a paywall. This means that you should not pay money to read this nicely summarised scientific evidence. This is often not the case with gnathologic courses where you commonly have to pay huge sums to get indoctrinated with quackery.

Here you can download the article with my highlights.

And here you can read or download the original paper:

Creating patients: how technology and measurement approaches are misused in diagnosis and convert healthy individuals into TMD patients. Greene C, Manfredini D and Ohrbach R (2023) Front. Dent. Med 4:1183327. doi: 10.3389/fdmed.2023.1183327