bookheaven | Jaws: The Story of a Hidden Epidemic

Jaws: The Story of a Hidden Epidemic by Sandra Kahn

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

More like a 2.5 read but I rounded up because of all the citations at the end of the book. I can no longer talk to my cousins who are dentists to judge their feelings about this. A dentist I saw as an emergency gave me the book (maybe because he knows I have pre-dental students in my a &p classes, It's not because I have a small jaw and crooked teeth).

It's a strange book, repetitive and honestly felt more like someone's doctoral thesis than anything else. Their hypothesis is two fold, one that orthodontics seem to be more out to generate money than to get to the root of the issues and two, it has less to do with genetics (not sure I entirely agree) and more to do with how we hold our jaws at rest (mouth breathing = smaller jaws, weaker chins, crowded teeth. Then again I tend to hold my jaw shut and I have room in my jaw for all my wisdom teeth. Is it that I don't mouth breathe or is it all the Neanderthal variants in my genome?)

The whole book is a bunch of anecdotal evidence about that thesis (with odd photos about attractiveness which seems out of the scope of what is being presented). I basically read it to get it off my shelf. It's not something I see recommending.

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