Heidi dives into the world of tongue ties with Lyndal Thomas, Pop Family’s Head of Speech Pathology. Together, they explore their personal and professional journey of understanding and treating tongue ties, highlighting the impact on speech, eating, and overall health.
Lyndal shares her own experiences and insights from tongue tie surgery as an adult (aka a lingual frenectomy or tongue-tie release), offering a no-nonsense look at the challenges and triumphs faced by those with orofacial myofunctional disorders.
Tune in for an enlightening conversation that blends personal stories with a peek behind the curtain of life as an orofacial myofunctional speech pathologist.
RESOURCES FROM TODAYโS SHOW
Meet Lyndal Thomas
Get your FREE Snapshot "How Tongue Ties Can Impact Everyday Life" โ
ย Subscribe to our newsletter to receive the ways that a person’s day-to-day function may be impacted by anย untreatedย tongue tie.
KEY TAKEAWAYS๐ก
โข Tongue ties can significantly impact speech and eating.
โข Holistic treatment approaches are crucial for effective management.
โข Personal experiences can provide valuable insights into treatment, but everybody’s experience will not be the same.
โข Speech pathologists play a key role in managing tongue ties.
โข Orofacial myofunctional therapy can be an essential part of pre and post-surgery for a frenectomy.
โข Understanding facial development is important in treatment.
โข Early intervention can prevent long-term issues.
โข Collaboration with body workers enhances treatment outcomes.
โข Education empowers patients to make informed decisions.
โข Each tongue tie journey and tongue tie release is unique and requires personalised care.
Watch the Episodes On YouTube |ย @BeyondWordsbyPopFamily
Follow us on Instagram | ย @beyondwordsbypopfamilyย @popfamily.au
Follow us on Facebook | ย @beyondwordsbypopfamilyย @popfamily.auย
HOSTS |ย Heidi Trusler, Founder ofย Pop Online Speech Therapyย and Speech Pathologist
MUSIC | Track: “Mountain Anthem” by Ryan Carlson
PRIVACY | Hosted on Libsyn. Seeย libsyn.com/tos-policies/privacy-policy/ย for more information.
DISCLAIMER
General Information Only (Not Medical Advice)
The information provided in this podcast is for general educational and informational purposes only. It is not a substitute for personalised assessment, diagnosis, or treatment provided by a qualified Speech Pathologist or other registered healthcare professional.
Nothing in this podcast should be interpreted as medical, therapeutic, or clinical advice. You should seek individualised medical professional advice if you have specific concerns.
Australian Context
This podcast is created within the Australian regulatory and professional context, including the Speech Pathology Australia standards. Listeners outside Australia should consider any local guidelines, regulations, or requirements.
Content Rights & Modifications
Pop Family reserves the right to edit, update, modify, replace, or remove any part of this podcast or its associated materials at any time, without prior notice. This includes audio episodes, transcripts, show notes, resources, or linked content. Information presented in earlier episodes may not remain current, complete, or accurate over time.
No Liability
Pop Family and any guests accept no responsibility or liability for any loss, damage, or injury that may arise from reliance on the information shared in this podcast.
Tongue Tie Surgery: A Personal Journey Transcript
Introduction and the Discovery
Heidi: Welcome to Beyond Words by Pop Family. I’m Heidi – Mum and speech pathologist, and today we’re tackling one of the most frequently mentioned topics in our inbox: tongue ties. What’s a tongue tie? What it really means to have a tongue tie and what the journey can actually look like. Hint, hint: it’s different for everybody. Joining me is Lyndal, Pop’s head of Speech Pathology and our clinical lead for orofacial myology. Now, that’s everything to do with your mouth, face muscles, and structure. We’ll get into that.
Lyndal completed her Bachelor of Speech Pathology at Newcastle Uni and has spent years working in rural and remote Australia. So she really gets what it’s like not having immediate access to the health services that families need. Lyndal is one of our many go-to speech pathologists at Pop that we turn to for clear evidence-based answers on tongue ties, feeding, chewing, swallowing, breathing, and overall facial development and growth. Having gone through her own tongue tie journey, this is the real-life and no-nonsense tongue tie conversation that you’ve been waiting for. Welcome to Beyond Words.
Lyndal: Thank you for having me. It’s so exciting to be here.
Heidi: Oh, it’s so exciting to have you on and to talk about your personal journey. Today we’re not talking about work, which is something different for us.
Lyndal: Yeah, it’s actually funny. I was thinking this morning this is such a full circle moment because I used to literally be a Pop Podcast fangirl. Like, that’s one of the reasons as to why I applied to work here and now I’m a guest.
Heidi: Hooray! And now you’re a star. I love that. Well, thank you for coming and being vulnerable to share your story. I really want to know and jump into it. I want to know how you learned that you had a tongue tie.
Lyndal: Yeah, it’s quite a funny story. Way back when in uni, when we were first learning to do traditional oral motor assessments, we were in the lecture theater and I was with my best friend. We were looking in each other’s mouths and I looked at hers and I was like, oh my God, why does it look so weird? Like, why does it look so different to mine? And it was at that moment that I’d realised that a majority of my life had been a lie and I, in fact, had a very restricted tongue.
They didn’t really likeโyou know, it was really surface-level information at that point in time though. It was like, oh, I’ve got a tongue tie, cool. What does that actually mean? And it wasn’t until I started working at Pop and started my own learning journey as a clinician that I realised that it was having a much greater impact on my overall function and quality of life than what I had ever really realised. So yeah, quite a profound journey and moment of realizing those things.
Heidi: Yeah, totally. I actually remember the moment when I learned about tongue ties too. And it’s because a girl at university turned around and said, “Look, I’ve got one, I’ll show you.” And hers was actually connected right to the tip. And I remember thinkingโand she explained about the history and why her mum chose not to treat it and how treating it and not treating it has gone in and out of vogue per se with doctors. And I actuallyโyou just took me back thereโand I remember thinking, “But you have so much trouble with your speech sounds.” This particular girl in my class, and I remember thinking, “This is having an impact on you.”
Unbeknownst to me, I also had one. I did not realise. So mine wasn’t having a functional impact on my speech, but it had a functional impact on a lot of other things. But at that time I was looking at her going, “Oh, but this thing, this is quite severe for you.” But I had one and they just don’t look the same. So you can look in 50 mouths and you’ll see 50 different things. There are the same sort of things that we look for, of course, but it really is quite specific, isn’t it?
Lyndal: Yeah, and I think like it’s ultimately not what it looks like, right? It’s in relation to mobility and those restrictive tissues at sort of that myofascial layer underneath the tongue. And really looking at then how that impacts on your speech and your eating and drinking and your airways and, yeah, your overall facial development as well.
Red Flags and Clinical Assessment
Heidi: So the girl at uni who I could visibly see hers, you know, that’s what everyone pictures when they picture a tongue tie. Like this tongue that won’t move because it’s restricted right to the tip. And obviously yours didn’t look like that. But yours looked very different to your friend’s and that’s why you thought your mouth was normal and your friend’s mouth looked really obscure. So I love that. That’s a really good example too for parents and health professionals who are listening, who are not trained in assessing tongue ties. Because the number one red flag when a health professional says to me, “I’ve had a look and it’s not there,” I’m like, well, you’ve just alerted me to the fact that you’re probably not trained to assess it because having a look is not enough.
Lyndal: Yeah, it’s the age-old story too that you hear from parents when we’re in the initial consultation or early in the journey. They’ve seen several health professionals or they’ve been dismissed by a lactation consultant or a pediatrician earlier on, or their GP or child health nurse, whoever it might have been. And so we’re getting to the point of seeing children at 5, 6, 7 plus, and the family is going, “Oh, well, no, we’ve had that checked out.” And really having to educate and empower them to come on this journey and sort of look a little bit deeper into the root cause of those problems.
Heidi: Oh, what a fun tangent. Okay, so back to you. On reflection, what were your symptoms as a child?
Lyndal: Well, my mum would probably attest to some of this because we’ve been on quite the journey talking about this together as well. But I was quite a sick child. I had really recurrent ear infections, tonsillitis, croup, you name it. I always had every upper airway infection possible. And so that has led into my adult life. And that’s probably the next stage of my journey that we’ll talk about in a little bit. But yeah, really sick child was one of them.
I didn’t have any speech sound difficulties, but one of the key things that I couldn’t nail down until I had learned about this was why I always avoided eating steak and why it would take me up to 45 minutes to finish a piece of steak at the dinner table and why I just simply hated roast meat or hated any chewy meats. Like, I just couldn’t figure it out. And it wasn’t that I didn’t like the tasteโit turns out that it was just hard work and I was spending so long trying to break this food down and move it around in my mouth. And yeah, that was not traumatic, but I think back to it and just think, gosh, like that was just… I remember so many meal times where I was struggling so much and could never figure out why. So as a child, they are sort of the key things that stick out to me.
Adult Symptoms and the Fascial Connection
Lyndal: But it wasn’t really until I started learning more about my symptoms as an adult that I realised that they had been sort of lifelong symptoms. So things like chronic headaches and migraines, full body postural differences. So I’ve got some leg length discrepancies and scoliosis in my back, which we can talk a little bit about.
Heidi: What’s a leg length discrepancy mean?
Lyndal: Like, a difference in my leg length, like one is shorter than the other, which is really interesting. And so in relation to how that fits in with scoliosis and how on earth this relates to tongue ties, basically your tongueโthe base of your tongue is connected to your deep line fascia. So your deep line fascia runs all the way down to your toes. Basically it runs all the way through your body and you’ve got fascia all over your muscles and all through your body. But that deep line fascia, if you’ve got a restriction in the mobility of your tongue and where that’s connected, then that’s going to have impacts on your hips and your knees and your back.
What happened with me is that I had a really significant jaw shift. So my jaw was shifting to the left-hand side when I was making certain sounds. And it’s not perfect now, but it’s definitely significantly improved. I can actually watch videos back of myself on Zoom now, so that’s good. But it was shifting really consistently every time I made that sound and got worse over time as I got tired. And the movement of your jaw to that side then brings everything out of whack. So it’s brought my head posture forward, it’s brought all of my right side up kind of like this. And so that’s where my scoliosis is.
So that was a really interesting one to learn about. Subsequently, I’ve also had a lot of issues with hip pain and back pain. So as a teenager in particular into my early adulthood, I really struggled with hip pain and I couldn’t run. I couldn’t run more than 200 meters at a time without significant pain. And I remember just breaking down as like an 18-year-old going, “Why can I not do these everyday things that all of my friends can do and they can go and play sport and they’re pain-free and I’m young and healthy and I should be able to do these things?” And so yeah, it’s been really interesting learning about that component of my body and how it actually has all linked into the root cause of the problem, which was my tongue, which is incredible.
The Holistic Care Team
Heidi: And who are the health professionals that helped you learn? Because we’re speech pathologists and we’re both orofacial myofunctional therapists as well. So we have additional training on top of our speech therapy degree in the area of – I’ll call it OM now – orofacial myofunctional disorders, which is all of this stuff. But we don’t necessarily know, for example, how to – we can see and we can sort of assess the whole body. We look at posture and that sort of thing but then we refer on to get those answers. Who helped you work out that your scoliosis and your… I have a very similar story. My hips are always out and then I’m always sitting funny on my chair and I always need additional support and I don’t use my core properly and I’m hypermobile. So it’s a similar case for a lot of people who have a tongue tie.
Lyndal: Yeah. So I went and saw a chiropractor and her name is Dr. Tanya G. She’s based in Brisbane and she was absolutely incredible, very holistic, uses a lot of principles from osteopathy as well as chiropractic. And basically when I saw her, I just remember my initial consultation with her, it was the most incredible appointment I think I’ve ever been to. She did all of her assessment but then also sent me for a full body X-ray, which is actually how I learned about my scoliosis despite…
Heidi: Is that just an X-ray or an MRI or a CBCT?
Lyndal: I actually don’t know the correct terminology, that’s really poor of me. But essentially you get into like this tube and you stand there and they do a full X-ray of your whole body. It could have been a CBCT potentially. And so it was fascinating. And that’s actually how I learned about the scoliosis, which is interesting to me because I spent a significant amount of time, I reckon about six months when I was in grade 10, seeing a chiropractor because of all of my hip issues. So it’s really interesting that that was never picked up on.
Heidi: Right. We generally won’t see jaw pain until adolescence or adulthood. It’s got to be pretty severe for a little child to have jaw pain. And then sometimes they don’t know how to explain it. I guess that’s the other thing that we can say of why we might not see it very often is they might not be eating that steak because it hurts.
Lyndal: Yeah, and it’s interesting, I learned recently this fun fact that for every inch that your head is forward, like out of line of your sort of optimal posture, it adds four and a half kilos of weight. Four and a half kilos – that’s huge. So looking at my posture as an adult, when I got assessed and was looking at all of this two and a half, three years ago, comparatively to when I was 15, you know, that’s sort of a great amount of time where that head posture was bringing more and more forward. I’m thinking about the movement of my jaw – you would expect that it would exacerbate over time. That’s my hypothesis anyway.
Going back to Tanya, she was the one that helped me connect all of the dots and provided me with lots of education. And I went through with a surgical intervention for my tongue tie. So I went and had a frenectomy at Enhanced Dentistry in Brisbane with Dr. Marjan Jones. And part of their protocol was that I had to have had a set amount of appointments done with Tanya, with the chiropractor, to look at that whole body tension and release and really look at how we could achieve optimal and maximal outcomes out of doing that release, so that the surgery was as effective as possible.
The Role of Evidence and Surgery
Heidi: The reason why we love working with Dr. Jones at Pop is also because she’s so holistic. She does have a lot of rules, like “I won’t operate unless there are body workers involved and unless basically you’re set up to have the best outcomes.” Because the surgery may fail if the rest of the body is not in alignment and you’re not able to do your follow-up exercises.
Lyndal: And I think also like having that really holistic team. You know, if we think about the clients that we see coming through our door as well, sometimes the first person we do refer them out to is a body worker to see that if they do get that level of release, is that going to give us optimal function of the tongue? Are we not as restricted where we need to go down a surgical intervention pathway? So they’re just such crucial people as part of that process.
Heidi: I’m definitely going to have to get some bodyworkers on the podcast. When I left university it was, “Oh, like chiropractors, witch doctors, and osteopaths, who are they?” But I mean, I’m well over that now. I refer to them all the time. I think that they’re a really integral part of the holistic team. Speech pathologists know from the head to the chest and then the body stops there. What about the toes? Oh, no, they don’t exist. We’re not allowed to comment on them. But, hello, your scoliosis is related to the issue with your tongue!
Okay, so I’m gonna be the devil’s advocate. I’m listening to this and I’m going, “But you’re just believing your own BS. Like, you both believe in this stuff and why would your tongue tie cause all of these things?” What would you say to someone who thinks, “Nah, how could you prove that? Or how could they all be related to this one thing?”
Lyndal: Yeah, I mean, it’s funny because I feel like I’ve had this healthy debate with a lot of dentists who don’t receive this additional training at university. And so I’m a firm believer in knowledge is power and advocating for my own experience to help inform and educate people. And I think that the biggest takeaway for me is that I have gone down this pathway, I’ve had this surgical intervention, I’ve done all of the right things in terms of prehab and rehab and orofacial myofunctional therapy, and my symptoms are gone.
Like, I’ve had a significant reduction in my headaches. I don’t have hip pain anymore. I can run. I’ve retained my swallow. My jaw shift has significantly improved and my entire face shape has changed completely. I think I totally get where people are coming from and going like, “Oh well, is this something that’s overdiagnosed or overtreated?” But if it’s people living their experience every single day, then I think that they deserve to have access to that information.
The Tipping Point and Muscle Tension
Heidi: I want to go back to the main symptom as an adult. Like, what was the worst thing or the tipping point that made you go – because surgery is a big decision – what made you decide to have surgery?
Lyndal: The real tipping point for me was the headaches. I had chronic headaches and migraines and being a speech pathologist and seeing a full caseload of people every single day, we do a lot of talking. I would get to the end of the day and it just felt like the base of my skull had been put into a vise and it was just being tightened. It would start at the base of my head there and then sort of come into my jaw as well. And it honestly was just relentless. It just got worse over time. I just thought, I just need to do something about this. I can’t get through a work week. I knew at that point what the root cause of the problem was, so I was pushing through it, but I just thought, oh God, I need help.
Heidi: Can you please explain you didn’t have like a typical tongue tie procedure? For a parent listening, we’ve got skin. Fascia is like second skin underneath our skin. It’s like these little interconnected fibers. If you eat meat, it’s that translucent layer that’s a little bit elastic, but still quite taut. So you went in for Dr. Jones and she told you what?
Lyndal: She identified all four ties, so upper and lower. We haven’t released the lip ties because they weren’t having a functional impact on me. But I had the frenectomy of my tongue tie done with a Waterlase machine. And then I had what was called a vestibuloplasty. Essentially it was releasing sort of the upper section in between your gums and your lip. The purpose of that was to support what was happening with the headaches. Because of the tongue tie, I was trying to get my tongue in optimal resting position – which means tongue tip up just behind your top teeth and suctioned to the roof of your mouth.
Because I was trying so hard to make that happen so that I could breathe through my nose and do all of the right things, so many muscles in my face were compensating all of the time. I was clenching my teeth and clenching my jaw. My cheeks were always on. I remember when we did some external training in orofacial myofunctional therapy, and they outed me and they were like, “That’s not your resting posture.” And I was like, “No, it is.” And they did this exercise where you had to tap on this little muscle here, it’s called your mentalis – it’s your little chin. They got me just to tap on it while they were talking to me, and all of a sudden my face just dropped and it just completely relaxed. My mouth opened and my tongue dropped, and they’ve gone, “Ha! That’s your resting posture.”
Prehab, Rehab, and Long-term Benefits
Heidi: So when I look at someone with a certain facial appearance, especially when they’ve got this line here under their chin or they’ve got dimples – under every dimple is a tie, which is fine! What is the importance of doing orofacial myofunctional therapy pre and post frenectomy?
Lyndal: In terms of the pre side of things, basically what you want to do is set yourself up for success for after the surgery. When you’re starting off with a tongue tie, it’s kind of like your mouth is a roadmap and your tongue is the car. And it can only go to certain points on the roadmap when it’s restricted. So how that functionally looks is that when we are trying to swallow our food or if we’re trying to chew and transfer food to the other side – for example, I used to be really terrible at lateralizing my tongue to the left side of my mouth. I just ate everything on the right side of my mouth because it was easier. Which also is going to make the right side of your face overdeveloped, giving you asymmetry.
When you do the release, all of a sudden you can go to all of these other places on the map that you’ve never been to. It’s like going on a fun holiday! So you have to teach your tongue how to get there. In the first week after the release, I bit my tongue so many times. With the pre-frenectomy exercises that we do, it’s about teaching the brain all of the different types of cues and essentially pre-programming what those motor patterns are going to be so that then once you’ve got that extra mobility, your brain already knows what to do.
Heidi: Who can do orofacial myofunctional therapy?
Lyndal: Speech pathologists who are trained in it, dentists, oral health therapists, IBCLCs.
Heidi: The reason why I think that speech pathologists are the best pre and post frenectomy therapists is because we are the only ones who also do eating, drinking, swallowing, chewing. That is actually ours. A dentist is not best placed to teach you how to eat because that’s not a part of their core training.
Lyndal: It’s not about perfection. It’s about optimal function and holistic health. Can you speak clearly? Can you eat well? Can you breathe? Arguably that’s the biggest one. If you’ve got a tongue tie and a low resting tongue, it’s one of those comorbidities that sometimes sits next to mouth breathing. And mouth breathing leads to that forward posture which leads to all of those whole body issues.
Heidi: Every time my toddler has a blocked nose, she wets the bed. Every time. She is mouth breathing, her sympathetic system is not right, she’s sleeping in fight or flight. That’s why we see bedwetting quite a lot in kids who have ties and sleep-disordered breathing.
Lyndal: In my instance, my reduced facial growth, especially in that upper jaw, meant I have the smallest eustachian tubes and ear canals. I’ve just come off the back of five weeks of vertigo from persistent ear infections as an adult! If we can catch those kids early on, we can grow their faces out so their eustachian tubes aren’t trapped inside small faces. We want to grow those faces big and wide as early as possible.
Heidi: Well, thank you, Lyndal. What a treat. I know that so many people are just gonna really find value in your story.
Heidi: I hope you enjoyed hearing about Lyndal’s tongue tie experience. I’ll be sharing loads more on this topic on our Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, so make sure you follow Beyond Words by Pop Family. Head to the show notes to get our tongue tie downloadables plus hit the follow button for even more episodes. Before we wrap up, I’d like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of lands, seas and waters throughout Australia and pay respect to elders past, present and future. Please also remember that this episode is not clinical advice. If you or your child are facing challenges in the areas that we discussed today, please seek an individualised speech pathology assessment or chat to your GP. Take care and we’ll catch you in the next episode.
Looking for more information on tongue ties?
Find out what you should do next if you suspect you or a loved one may have a tongue tie booking in a free advice call with our experienced Pop Speech Pathologists.
