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He gained a following for techniques, notably one known as mewing, that he said could help fix crooked teeth without surgery. The medical establishment disagreed.
John Mew, a British orthodontist whose unorthodox methods for fixing crooked teeth and resculpting jaws, including a technique widely known as mewing, were dismissed by the medical establishment but embraced by a huge audience online, died on June 25 at his home in Heathfield, in East Sussex, England. He was 96.
His death, in a moated castle that he and his wife built in the 1990s, was announced in a video tribute by his son Mike Mew, who was also his business partner and fellow orthodontist. It was not widely reported at the time.
“To many he was a genius, a visionary,” Mike Mew said in the video. “But he was also considered a heretic and a charlatan in equal proportions.”
Dr. Mew’s philosophy was on the fringe of orthodontics. He held that crooked teeth were the result not, as mainstream orthodontists believe, of genetics, but of lifestyle and environmental changes since the 18th century that caused jaws to grow smaller and recessed, leading teeth to come in misaligned. He theorized that soft processed foods made jaw muscles weak, and that as people moved into polluted cities, they developed allergies that caused them to inhale through their mouths, not their noses, which warped their jaws.
“As a result,” William Brennan wrote in a profile of the Mews in The New York Times Magazine in 2020, Dr. Mew believed that “we’ve been robbed not only of tidy smiles” but also of “the well-defined faces that were the birthright of our ancient ancestors, and which Mew regards as the mark of true beauty.”
His solution, the foundation of what he called orthotropics, had the goal of increasing tongue space, expanding jaws and dental arches, and improving facial structure. It involves chewing harder food and using a specialized appliance for the mouth that moves the upper jaw and teeth forward. The appliance makes it uncomfortable for children to drop their lower jaw down or back.