My thoughts on the DIY method, Starecta

I did Starecta for many years since 2014 and while it helped me, I eventually concluded that it was flawed.

Check out the youtube

Now onto the article..

Starecta is where I first got into this whole DIY game and quite honestly I am still grateful to it to this day for essentially having saved my life in 2014.

I was really bad in 2014 and losing hope. And I found Starecta in the nick of time.

I think I was only the 2nd person outside of Italy to begin the method (after a guy named Plato). And the founder, Moreno, and the Starecta community in general had always been solid partners along my journey in those early days.

So I do not want to discount any of that.

But I do think it is flawed. And today i will explain why.

First, what is Starecta?

Starecta is a DIY (Do it yourself) dental method that was developed by a guy in Italy named Moreno (pictured above) to solve for the devastating health issues he was having as a young man.

You can find their site at https://starecta.com/.

Moreno came up with an appliance that he called the ‘rectifier’ that started to resolve these issues.

The primary issue he had, and the one that Starecta is most focused on, is posture. As you can see in this picture below the kyphosis & lordosis that Moreno had improved significantly.

The way that it worked when I was in the group back in 2014 was that you got a lower splint or retainer (I got mine from a dentist), and then you used acrylic dental resin (often used for making crowns by dentists) on top of it.

The resin is soft and then hardens when exposed to the air. So you register a bite while saying the letter “O” with your jaw and then let it harden so that it locks the position of the jaw when wearing the appliance.

The idea was that this would center your jaw to your skull and thus better support it.

Also they had the idea that there is a ‘molar lever’ in which the back teeth act as a kind of lever to lift the skull on the cervical spine.

And so you keep re-registering bites every 1-2 weeks as things start to improve.

Meaning you drilled off the previous ‘pits’ that were in the resin and put new resin on to form new ones based on making the “O” position.

I did Starecta intermittently from about late 2014 till about late 2017

I believe I started Starecta officially in November 2014. I was doing it strictly according to the protocol till I think around spring of 2015. And I was doing pretty well.

I’d gotten out of all kinds of symptoms like brain fog, vision issues, my cognitive function improved massively, I felt more energy, etc.

In fact this skull (below) that they put in some of their marketing materials is actually my skull. lol

The left side was before I started Starecta in mid-2014 and the right side was in May 2015 when i was 7 months into it. Look specifically at the change in the cervical spine as I’d taken a significant amount of torsion out.

And so I was pretty confident early on that Starecta works.

You can read more about my journey here: https://tooth-for-a-tooth.com/starecta/ken/. Someone from Russia had copied an old blog post that I’d made in 2015, which i’d deleted a short while after posting as I didn’t want the attention it was getting.

But then I started experimenting with other things.

In part because it felt like I’d plateaud with the method, and at times was getting worse. But also in part because it seemed like Moreno, himself, was testing some other things.

So it didn’t seem to me like Starecta was the full answer.

I was doing my own experiments at various points in 2015-16

This was a very important part of my journey. Because it is when I discovered all of the things that I am doing now and later concluded is the ‘truth’.

Basically I had been given a myobrace from a US dentist I was in touch with and was making great progress from it. I would use no appliance during the day but wear the myobrace to sleep at night.

I’d also learned to do some jaw exercises that essentially accelerated the process, which are the same ones I use today. This is all back in late 2015.

At some point I had managed to stretch the soft tissue to the point that my jaw repositioned to its correct anatomical position and my entire spine corrected with a 'clack, clack, clack’ all the way done.

I felt and looked amazing for this short period of time. I literally looked better than i had at any point in my life previous to this.

But then because I had an open posterior bite, I’d decided to revert back to Starecta sometime later. And this ended up screwing up the soft tissue again.

It’s funny because at the time I figured that there must be more to it. There must be some secret knowledge that the best dentists in the world have which I am missing.

But the reality that I’d concluded later on was that what i’d achieved by chance thru my own experiments at this time was actually further than I think any dentist in the world had ever gotten.

I had figured out the soft tissue and how it is key to the whole puzzle. I was the only person that could stretch the soft tissue such that the skin of my face and scalp would break and shed every day for months. As this was necessary to remodel the skull.

Why do I think Starecta is flawed?

Now it is 2024 and I’ve been using the same principles since 2021 to get better and better. And i’m almost done.

My principles are to:
1- Add ‘vertical’ between the teeth
2- Unlock the occlusion (ie. upper and lower teeth should not fit together in a fixed position during the healing process)

Starecta violates rule #2 as you lock a position between the upper and lower teeth when you register a bite.

The modern Starecta appliance, which you can see above, used to be called the ‘plug & play’. It is essentially made out of polymorph plastic.

I used polymorph plastic on top of splints for many years ever since 2015. In fact I’m very confident me and Marcello were doing it before the guys from Italy ever did.

You put it in hot water and it gets soft, then it hardens as it cools.

I do not do this anymore and have not for over four years because i consider it wrong. I repeated that experiment many many times over the years and concluded it was wrong after seeing its impact on my own body numerous times.

Another interesting post on this topic is this one.

Indexed splints and the magical "perfect jaw position"

Starecta will not get someone to the “end”

With what I do now I just keep improving and expect to reach ‘the end’ hopefully by mid-2025. Meaning perfect body, perfectly symmetric skull, and perfect health at age 47 while having done no exercise and paying no attention to diet.

Even now I work from 8am till past 10pm daily like a machine without having gotten sick in over 4 years because my system is just humming. And i never felt like this with Starecta.

I also predict that anyone doing Starecta will never achieve this. And knowing a lot of folks from Starecta from back in the day and still being connected to them on Facebook, I can say pretty confidently that I do not know of anyone that took this stuff close to its ‘true end’.

As their progress will plateau and then probably just hover/go in circles for years… sometimes a bit better, sometimes a bit worse.

To understand why better.. you really need to understand what I wrote about the curve of spee:

The Curve of Spee

And the tracking splint:

A 'tracking splint' is the compass for your TMJ journey

As these concepts are key to understanding how to measure progress and ensure you continue in the right direction.