Lost in the maze

Figuring out the rules to how biomechanics works felt like a massive maze

Sometimes people ask me something like…. “Ken you say you first stumbled on the right path back in 2016…. how come you didn’t finish a long time ago?”

Or another one I get is… “How long have you been doing this stuff? 10+ years? How come you’re not done yet?”

And so I want to talk about the part of this game that is to me perhaps the trickiest part.

The psychological game of trying to figure out how these biomechanics work. Because it is a mental game of the highest echelon in my experience.

A game that has broken the vast majority of people that tried to figure it out.

And today i’m going to try to explain this part as best as I can.

Trying to figure this stuff out is like being lost in a maze

Back in mid-2014 after a TMJ dentist in Vietnam drilled my back teeth and flattened them considerably I embarked on a rapid collapse process. Thick brain fog, I couldn’t sleep, I felt like a hermit and wanted to avoid all people, etc.

And I started shooting out in all directions desperately seeking answers.

I was seeing a chiropractor a couple times a week. I was doing Chinese medicine. I went to a pscychiatrist for the first time in my life. And I was going to lots of TMJ dentists who gave me an array of various TMJ splints.

I was trying to get my life back. But instead I just kept going in circles and seemingly got worse.

I couldn’t put the rules together.

Every dentist I went to had a different interpretation of the problem and a different proposed solution.

And all of their promises turned out to be empty ones that just cost me more money and time.

Luckily in late 2014 I stumbled upon Starecta and that improved me sufficiently to get me out of my desperation. But then I started to go in circles even with Starecta and I couldn’t understand why.

What the hell were the rules to how this game is played?

It felt like a maze.

This is a maze that confounds almost everyone and even destroys many

This maze that i’m talking about is one that afflicts many millions of people around the world.

They have many names for it… some call it TMJ, some call it brain fog, some call it back or neck pain, etc. There are tons of different names that all essentially mean the same thing “biomechanical collapse.”

And the way that people try to tackle it is just as diverse.

For the folks that have more severe TMJ-like symptoms they often hop dentists for many years and try to manage a variety of pretty debilitating symptoms.

None of them figure it out. Rather at best they learn to live with it and hopefully it’s not that bad. Just have a look at the r/TMJ subreddit if you don’t believe me.

Some of them give up. And take their own lives. I know three people that essentially did that back in the day.

And one of the worst things about it all… is that the people outside of the maze looking in at you, ie. the healthy people, often don’t understand you. Their bodies and minds seem to not have the same flaws yours does.

I stumbled upon the answer and there was a lot of luck involved

Getting to the exit of this maze took a lot of time, perseverence and iteration. And more than that.. it took a lot of luck.

I went in circles between the years of 2014 till late 2021, which is when I deem i finally ‘fully figured it out’.

Between those years I collapsed and then resurrected myself at least 4-5x. But even that was not 4-5 straight lines… it was more like 4-5 main zigzags with lots of tiny ones for shorter periods of time mixed in.

It was extremely frustrating.

And it was a psychological war. One that took all of my strength and then some. Because your whole life nosedives when things get worse (my family, my career, my friendships, my health, etc).

When I think about how I figured it out in the end.. there were a number of very lucky pieces thrown in along the way, for example:

• I found Starecta while randomly Googling in late 2014

• I met my old friend, Marcello, while doing Starecta and we started to realize the flaws of Starecta around the same time in 2015. That relationship with him became fundamental later on because he is the one that first concluded the importance of the curve of spee and the fact that the jaw needs multiple positions supported by the cusps of the teeth.

• In 2016 my ALF dentist just happened to send me a Myobrace A1 (that I didn’t even ask him for) and this ended up being a critical tool that I kept using on and off in the following years

• And there are probably lots of other things that I am forgetting

Point is… take away one of those critical pieces… and I would have been lost. My life would have been screwed. I would probably still be in the ‘maze’ to this day.

You need to be hypothesis-driven to figure the maze out in my view

A young person I talk with fairly regularly was chatting with me not long back and told me he was ‘experimenting’.

He was dabbling with a couple of appliances and trying to deduce his own rules based on how he felt with them.

I smiled with nostalgia at the days when I tried to do that. Complete and utter waste of time.

Because the body sometimes tricks you and sends you the wrong signals.

For example during the initial weeks of leaving myself with a posterior open bite and not supporting it with a mouthguard… I at first felt more grounded and ‘normal’. Almost as if I was getting better. But it was a smokescreen.

Reality was that my body and skull were collapsing in on itself and I was getting worse. Something I would often only figure out months later. And this is the reason i’d screwed myself up yet again back in late 2019-2020.

Things like this happened many many times in the early years.

I’d interpret something as a bad signal, think i was getting worse, and then change to some other approach or appliance. Without any overriding hypothesis on what the rules to the game were… simply because I thought I would ‘feel’ better.

There were times in 2017 when i’d change what i was doing almost every week or two. And i’d just end up circling through the same set of conclusions over and over again.

You cannot approach this problem this way. I guarantee that everyone that does… ends up extremely frustrated and gives up eventually.

How do I know? Because i’ve seen many hundreds of people do it over the years since 2014. I knew people in Starecta, TMJ Facebook groups, Reddit, etc. that all thought they were gonna figure it out.

However with the exception of Marcello and myself… every single one of them who i’m aware of (that hasn’t started Reviv) is still in the maze to this day.

You need to be hypothesis-driven to figure out this maze in my view.

Meaning you need to have a hypothesis about how it works and then you need to test that hypothesis in a structured way and document your results.

Then you need to iterate with a ton of discipline for a long time till you hopefully stumble upon the right answer.

Who else has figured out this maze?

Think about how human health has evolved in the past few decades.

People are unhealthier than ever before. Things like neurological disease and neurodevelopmental disorders (eg. ADHD, OCD) are skyrocketing. Obesity is pervasive.

So obviously the doctors and dentists haven’t figured it out. Neither have the chiropractors, the osteopaths or whoever else you can think of.

All of their patients are traveling inside this maze I talk about whether they want to admit it or not.

Because if you don’t know these four fundamental facts… then you are (in my definition) still in the maze:

1. The importance of the curve of spee

2. The jaw needs multiple positions (retrusion & protrusion) supported by the cusps of the teeth

3. The fact that the human body & skull deflate if you screw up 1 or 2 above.

4. Flat contact like a mouthguard can reverse the damage and inflate the skull/body

Which medical or dental discipline out there is talking about these four pillars?

Do I hear crickets?

Closing thoughts

There are thousands of people improving upon all kinds of health issues from Reviv now. Some of them chronic conditions that they tried to solve for many years and spent a ton of money on.

And they are marveling as to why a simple piece of silicon works when all the expensive stuff they tried failed. Hahaha

And the answer to why that is… is simple. This thing is a maze with a set of rules, which IF you know THEN you can make your way out of the maze relatively easily.

But if you don’t know them… figuring out the rules on your own is next to impossible.

Sometimes people message me and tell me they think I’m wrong or they want to correct me. For example one person did this just recently and told me that opening a posterior open bite is completely wrong in their opinion.

And so he’s doing something else that he thinks is going to work better for him.

But what he doesn’t realize is just how many countless times I did something similar these past years.

How many times I thought I saw an exit out of this maze… just to realize some months later that I was right back where I’d started.

If you wanna try to find different rules to this maze… all i can say is “good luck because you’re gonna need it.”