I found this story of American Ken three years ago in a blog on biomechanical treatment of a Spaniard. Unfortunately, the blog doesn’t exist anymore. With the permission of the author, I have translated this article into Russian. Now I am translating it back into English. I know that Ken would like to forget about everything that happened and just live a normal life. But I really hope that he would not mind that other people knew his story. And his story is very instructive…

My name is Ken, I am an American guy of thirty-eight years old, with a Ukrainian wife and a one-year-old child, I now live in Vietnam. For more than fifteen years, I have struggled with health problems, including tight neck, back, loss of voice, and constant brain fog that made me almost unable to concentrate. This is my story about how, without any result, I went through about 100 different doctors and, having lost all hope, in complete despair tried the experimental Starecta method, which literally saved my life.

The beginning

I started noticing my first health problems after graduating from college. The first thing I noticed was the tension in my voice. In noisy places it was very difficult to hear me – my voice was weak and had no resonance. I first decided to go to the ENT, it was around 2000 – and when he found nothing, I decided to visit several other doctors in Boston, where I was living at the time. One of them suggested that I start physical therapy with elastic bands as I had a tight neck. I did the exercises regularly, but it didn’t give any results.

Years with doctors (2001-2011)

In 2001, I packed my bags and went to Japan to work as a consultant in Tokyo. I was young, ambitious, and despite my medical problems, I thought I was invincible. I worked eighty hours a week and hung out in nightclubs and bars three or four times a week. I still had problems with my voice, but for some reason they were always mitigated by the use of alcohol. This is probably why I went out so often. All this time, I continued to visit doctors in Tokyo and also in Malaysia, where I spent half of my time because of my firm’s projects. While working on one particularly stressful project, I noticed that my neck and left shoulder were painfully tense. I understood that it was stress, but I could not understand what caused it, so I began to regularly visit a chiropractor and also do acupuncture. But none of this helped.

In 2003 I moved to Barcelona to study. Spain is great for having free health insurance that covered my treatment while I was there on a student visa. I took the opportunity to the fullest, as the health problem became quite disturbing – I felt daily intense tension on the entire upper body on the left side – in the throat, neck, shoulder. The voice was especially frustrating for me when I tried to be heard in noisy places, and it is especially frustrating if you are doing a business administration program and are going to attend many social events. The neurologist concluded that I had a problem with the nervous system and prescribed some powerful medicine for me. It helped a little by blocking the signals, but it didn’t fix the cause. I continued to visit the ENT, and at some point I thought that I had reflux gastritis. But gastroduodenoscopy showed that this is not the case. When I returned to New York for my internship in 2004, I visited a chiropractor several times a week for several months, but again to no avail.

In 2005 I finished my studies and moved to London to start working as a consultant again. I decided to use alternative methods and started visiting NHS doctors. To deal with the muscle tension on the left side, I tried Botox injections, but they didn’t work. Then I tried cranial therapy, but again without significant changes.

In 2008 I moved to Moscow, continuing to experience the same symptoms. I had good health insurance from my company, so I began to regularly visit the “Medicina” clinic, which at that time was considered one of the best in Russia. They took me a bunch of X-rays and didn’t find anything special, so they offered me physiotherapy and massage. I went to them for about six months, doing yoga regularly. I felt a little better, but only the symptoms were slightly reduced, but their root cause was not eliminated. Also at that time I noticed that I get tired much more than my friends when we went out for a drink. I sinned on genetics, but, as I understand now, it had nothing to do with my problem.

In early 2010, my company transferred me to Ukraine, and there I continued to visit doctors in the hope that one of them would help me identify the root cause of my problems. I went to several clinics and visited a wide range of specialists from ENT specialists to orthopedists. I did a lot of X-rays, MRIs and other tests. I went to see the best doctors in the former Soviet Union, but nothing helped. Their best recommendation was to stand on your head and swim on your back, which only helped for a short while. I supplemented them with regular acupuncture and massage, which eased the tension a little. But from that moment on, the tension in the neck and back only began to increase, and in order for my body to relax, after coming home from work, I just had to go to bed.

Years with dentists (2011-2015)

Sometime in 2011, I visited the dentist to have my teeth refurbished and mentioned my problem with muscle tension. He said that most likely I had TMD and made me take a bunch of X-rays of my jaw. After that, he made me a special mouthguard, which I had to wear at night. I did this for about three months, but it didn’t work. Therefore, my dentist advised me to visit another specialist who had more experience in this area.

This specialist made me another splint for the lower jaw, which he recommended to wear during the day. I have been wearing this mouthguard for several months and have visited the dentist to have it adjusted every two weeks. But during all this time, I felt only a slight improvement, and my voice continued to be tense. Therefore, at some point, my dentist said that it was not worth continuing, and said that my last hope was the best specialist in Ukraine, one woman who held a ministerial office and had her own clinic of a very high level.

I went to the appointment, and she introduced me to her employee – the best, in her words, specialist in the country in cases like mine. His name was Oleg. He made a simple jaw splint for me and then made me stand up. He pointed out which position of the shoulders and body I should take in order for the splint to fix them in this correct position. I left feeling much better. I was shocked. This was the first time I felt good in years. There was something about what this guy was doing… I felt for the first time with full confidence that the problem that had plagued me all these years was not rooted somewhere in my body, but in my jaw.

I continued to visit Oleg for about five months. Every two weeks, he corrected the splint using dental paper to see where the tooth contact was, and then grinded those contacts. For the first months I felt great and thought the problem was solved. But I found it strange that as soon as I removed the splint, my head immediately became “cloudy”, as if I had some kind of neurological symptoms. Oleg never gave an explanation for many of the questions that interested me, preferring to say bluntly that he doesn’t know what he is doing and that he has done this procedure with many patients, and for some reason it works. He just didn’t know why it worked, and he didn’t want to lie. In any case, after the first months improved, I got worse every week. Oleg made the same adjustments, but they ceased to be effective. At some point, he looked at my legs, and said that perhaps my flat feet is the reason why splint therapy stopped working. Oleg said that this would destabilize my bite, and therefore I would first need to make special insoles and then adjust my jaw in this new position. Unfortunately, this was right before in February 2014 I was going to leave Ukraine for good and move to Vietnam for work. So I promised that I would try the insole method as soon as I get to my new place of residence.

Upon arrival in Vietnam, I continued my fellowship with the dentists. I got shoe inserts made by a guy who said my right leg was shorter and therefore recommended raising the height on that side. As it turned out later, this was a rather stupid mistake, since different leg lengths arise not due to the fact that one leg is shorter, but due to the fact that the inclination of the pelvis changes. Anyway, after making the inserts, I found a TMJ specialist in Saigon on the Internet, and asked to make him a mouthguard for me. Immediately after placing it on my lower jaw, I instantly felt terrible. The dentist promised every time that she would start working when he corrected it every two weeks. After several months, I stopped believing him and stopped his treatment. I returned to my old mouthguard from Ukraine, but bit a hole in it on one side, and it didn’t work anymore. I was in despair, I had to urgently do something, because I had a feeling of a “clouded” brain – my attention and memory were weakened.

Around June 2014, I started visiting a specialist known as the best TMD doctor in Vietnam. He had his own downtown practice complete with fancy equipment and a long waiting list. The doctor conducted many new studies, and diagnosed a displacement of the jaw joint on the right side. He also said that the disc was displaced. In doing so, he came to the conclusion that I should use a splint to reposition the jaw forward, which I started using.

The splint pushed my jaw forward, but I was getting worse and worse. Every visit I complained to him that the splint didn’t work, but he assured him that it was not. Meanwhile, due to my inability to concentrate, I lost my confidence and became afraid to get up every morning for work. I also began to lock myself in my “little shell”, because I didn’t want to talk to anyone, and constantly thought that my wife was due to give birth in mid-July, and this meant that we would be stuck in Vietnam, at least for several months after childbirth. I didn’t know if I should wait so long because of my deteriorating condition and the fact that I was never able to find adequate medical care here. It was the most miserable time in my life, although it should have been one of the happiest. And I could not get rid of the fear and kept asking myself: “What if I never get better? How then can I take care of my family?”

After another couple of months, my skepticism about the effectiveness of the splint used reached its climax, and I demanded that the dentist try something else. At that moment, he became arrogant and said if this doesn’t work, I can just leave, but I cannot find anyone else in Vietnam to help me. I was shocked by the lack of any sympathy from his side and from his staff, and told him that I would take the risk. I’m even afraid to imagine how many people were broken by his arrogance. Anyway, my wife gave birth to a lovely boy, Kevin, and seeing him every morning, I found the strength to find a way to get out.

So I tried to go to a western clinic run by a French dentist. She was also equipped with fancy technology, all the emigrants with good jobs visited him, so I decided that I should try too. As it turned out, he himself was not a TMJ specialist, but he had an employee on his staff who assured him that he was. In fact, this guy was using a technique he learned from a visiting American dentist during a weeklong training seminar. He recreated my bite in the articulator, claiming to be using “the latest TMJ treatment”. Some time later, I learned that it is impossible to correctly recreate the bite with a TMD problem in the articulator, since in fact this only makes the problem worse. But I went with a new mouthguard for about four months and came to correct it every two weeks. The “fogging” of my brain was already starting to exhaust me, several times a week I visited a chiropractor, and also did regular massage to cope with my back and neck pain. I was so tired that by six o’clock in the evening I felt completely exhausted, and struggled to survive at work and was as effective at it as a person with six years of education.

After three or four months of such a life, I tried again to visit the dentist, and I was faced with the fact that it didn’t work again. The clinic reacted to this with understanding and returned my money, although I didn’t even ask for it. And again I began to try to find something new. This time I was pretty blown away, because it seemed to me that I could not find a solution in Vietnam, and my condition worsened. I began to think about returning to the US, but still decided to try to find someone in the Asian region. In Sinapure, I found a dentist working according to the GNM method, and I myself began to study it, communicate with this specialist and his employees.

But before deciding on regular trips to Singapore for treatment, I decided to try a specialist I found in Saigon via Facebook. There he wrote some pretty intelligent posts about TMD, and that gave me a glimmer of hope. I asked him to do an NTI-tss splint for me as I read promising things about him on the internet. He made it, and I wore it for several weeks, although I looked pretty stupid with it (this splint has a specific shape and is worn on the front teeth). But by that time I had already lost my normal self-esteem and all dignity, and just wanted to get out of the nightmare I was in.

Around the same time, I began communicating with a posturologist in Orlando, Florida, who claimed to have cured a large number of TMJ patients with a new physiotherapy technique he had developed. I spoke with him on the phone several times and I was inspired by his seeming understanding of my situation and the promise of a refund in case the methodology does not help me. So I decided to take a chance… In October 2014, I took advantage of a two-week vacation to travel with my family to New York and show the parents of their grandson, while I flew to Orlando to undergo a two-week treatment with this specialist. In fact, it turned out to be a waste of time, and he himself was simply a fraud. Anyway, after I realized by the end of the first week that his shitty technique wasn’t working, I decided to visit an orthogonal chiropractor in Orlando as I was reading encouraging things about the method.

This specialist took pictures of my Atlas and showed me that my first cervical vertebra was displaced and tilted. Hope was reborn in me. Perhaps this was the root cause all along? A little work to straighten my Atlas – and maybe I’ll be as good as new again? How I wished it… While in Florida, I did three sessions in a week and returned to Vietnam expecting improvement. But that never happened. My brain was in a “cloudy” state all the time, and when the initial uplift due to the placebo effect dissipated, I felt in the same shitty state as before. And then I quickly began to lose hope. I constantly thought about how I could take care of my little son if I lived in this state for the rest of my life. It was the scariest time in my life up to this moment, and all this drove me into such a deep depression that I first thought about visiting a psychiatrist (although all this was contrary to my beliefs, and I do not take all these intoxicants). Nevertheless, I decided to try an antidepressant prescribed by a psychiatrist and began to feel very strange. Plus, I read that this drug is addictive and threw it away after a few days. Anyway, I knew it was not a solution to the problem.

Start with the Starecta method (since 2014)

So, in October 2014, I was in a very deplorable state – both physically and mentally. I was so exhausted that I did not even have the strength to rejoice at my little son, although it was because of him that I struggled every day to look for a way out. Every day I spent an hour or two on the Internet looking for answers, or at least to find out if anyone else was suffering from these kinds of things. And then my prayers were answered. I came across a blog written by a guy named Plato Powers. His approach to the problem seemed quite intriguing to me, and I decided to write to him via the email indicated on the blog. He wrote to me back in November, answering my questions, and at the end of the letter he added: “You can also see the material of these guys – www.starecta.com” (the description of the method is here), the most important thing in my life.

I immediately rushed to read everything on their website. I read the free pdf book, and I really liked it, because I myself went through a lot of what the author experienced. I immediately got in touch with the founder of the Starecta Method Moreno Conte and we spoke on Skype. He came across as a pretty knowledgeable person, I admired what he went through in search of healing, and I realized that I, too, had nothing to lose. The next task was to find the necessary materials in Vietnam – a simple splint on the lower teeth, a drill and acrylic dental material (at the moment, the creators of the technique have developed an ultra-modern splint that changes its shape by immersion in hot water, and therefore it does not require the application of additional material, or you can look this information how to do it yourself). I spent two weeks hunting for these materials in dental stores, at distributor offices, and at the dentists I had previously visited, until I found what I needed. I was lucky to get the last container of the material as it was difficult to import into Vietnam due to its flammability. After two weeks of searching, I was more proud of myself than Sherlock Holmes.

The night I fixed the Starecta splint for the first time was very stressful. All the time I thought to myself: “What if this resin sticks to my teeth? What will I do then? What if all this doesn’t work? ” Fortunately, I could call Moreno, so I calmed down… and made my first splint. The amount of compound that I put on the splint in the area of ​​large teeth was small, but there was a large distance between my front incisors. My upper jaw tilted upward, unlike Moreno’s photo in the book, where the jaw tilted downward (you can look for the solution of this problem here). Anyway, I decided to see what happened, and after about ten days I felt much better… the brain fog cleared away. I started to get better and feel better. Within two months, the brain fog almost disappeared. However, I still felt a slight tension on the left side, my head was still noticeably tilted to the right, and I still had a noticeable asymmetry in my body (one shoulder higher than the other, a compressed rib cage, a displaced stomach to the left). I had never paid attention to these asymmetries before, but I was amazed at how significant they were. They must have been getting worse for years.

I was excited about the initial progress. Over the course of several months, I continued to see major improvements in my posture and facial symmetry. Before, when I sat on a chair, I always leaned on my left side and leaned back. Sitting upright for more than a few minutes was impossible for me. Now I could sit like this for hours at work. My productivity at work also steadily increased as the brain fog disappeared. My memory improved and I began to think more clearly. A resonance began to appear in my voice. Gradually, at work, self-confidence returned to me. Also in January 2015, I decided to accept a promotion that my boss had been offering me for a long time.

8 months with Starecta

After eight months, I could say that I have completed 60-70% of my journey. My head straightened out, the “brain fog” went away completely, I gained more energy than in all the past years, I began to look and feel much healthier. This was reflected in almost all areas of my life, especially in my family. I began to wake up every day in a good mood, lively and ready to start a new day. My working days began to pass efficiently and confidently, as they once did many years ago, and I again began to think about career growth, although a year before that I thought that I had reached my limit.

12 months with Starecta (Dec 2015)

My whole body and back are moving towards symmetry, as you can see in the photo below. Also notice that in the first photo (December 2014) I was on a special high protein, low carb diet, swimming about twenty laps six times a week and lifting weights from time to time. In the photo on the right, I gave up all sorts of diets and began to eat whatever I want, when I want, including ice cream before bed. Plus I reduced the swim to four laps and dropped the dumbbells. However, everything I eat turns into muscle and my back takes a V shape, which has never happened in my life.

On top of that, my jaw has evolved and become more square and my face more symmetrical (as you can see in the photo below). I used to have a lot of wrinkles on my forehead, but now they are all gone. Everyone who hasn’t seen me for a while says that I have started to look much younger. Plus, for some reason, I feel more testosterone.

It is also the result of the hard tongue exercises (mewing), that I have done. I have become a huge fan of British doctors Mew (father and son) and their Orthotropic method.

Finally, my thinking became clearer and my ability to handle responsibility increased dramatically. At work, from a non-supervising manager, I began to “lead” ten products in a rather complex job (we are designing a system for the largest electronics company in Asia). Despite the significant increase in accountability, I experience much less stress at work than I did a year ago. In short, the changes have been amazing and I am very grateful for that.

Last thoughts

I try to share my experience with others who have TMD, and give others what I received as a gift. Somehow I was asked: “Why are you spending so much time on TMJ forums trying to tell skeptical people and dentists about Starecta, who do not perceive anything but the usual. Doesn’t it exhaust you?” I thought a little and remembered how broken I was a year ago. I remembered…

… how I thought about my son every time I wanted to give up

… how can I play with my boy now and look to the future with optimism

… and there are others who are now in the same situation as I was.

I did not answer that person, and if I did, it would be: “No. It doesn’t wear me out, and I’m not sure it will ever happen”.

P.S. A note from me, the author of this blog. Over the three years of maintaining the Russian-speaking community, we have done a great job of analyzing the progress of many people and came to the conclusion that the Starecta method must be complemented by mewing, since this method allows you to align the structure of the skull and postures additionally in the third plane, for example, in the case of vertical strain skull (pronounced underbie) like Ken’s. How to combine both methods – you read here.

Update: Ken invented his interesting method – you can visit his YouTube channel!
_________________________