Twenty years of knee pain, traced back to childhood orthodontic hardware.
A woman in her mid-30s came to see me with knee and IT band pain that had bothered her for 20 years, since she was a competitive basketball player and runner in high school. The pain had ended her basketball career and continued to limit her running — by the time she saw me, it consistently appeared around the 1.5-mile mark of a run, despite years of conventional treatment directed at the knee and IT band themselves.
What I found
She had wire dental retainers on both her upper and lower front teeth, in place since childhood. On muscle testing, I found that pressure on the retainers was associated with neurological inhibition in muscles below the waist — testing that, as far as I could tell, no one had previously performed.
What I did
I showed her the muscle-testing changes associated with the retainers. She chose to have the wires removed by her orthodontist, and I performed additional cranial adjusting to address the restrictions I’d found.
What changed
Within a week of the wires being removed, she reported running more than four miles without pain — a distance she hadn’t been able to manage in 20 years.
Orthodontic retainers don’t cause problems for everyone who wears them — most people do fine. I don’t tell patients to remove permanent retainers; I show them what I find on testing and let them decide, together with their orthodontist, and I recommend removable retainers afterward to protect the orthodontic result. This case illustrates why I test rather than assume, especially when a symptom has persisted despite treatment directed at the painful area itself.
Related reading
Read about the relationship between the cranium, face and jaw, or see more real patient cases.