Tongue-Tie Treatment in Beverly, MA
A tongue-tie is a band of tissue under the tongue that holds it down and limits how far it can move. When the tongue cannot reach the roof of the mouth, it cannot do the work it is built for, and that work matters more than most people know. The tongue holds the airway open at night. It swallows. It shapes speech. It rests against the palate, or it does not, and the difference reaches into the jaw, the airway, and the teeth.
Most people who have one were never told. It surfaces late, usually while looking for the cause of something else: an airway that closes during sleep, a jaw that aches every morning, headaches nobody has explained, teeth that drift back after braces, a swallow that has always compensated with the wrong muscles.
At Kuljic DDS & Team in Beverly, we assess the tongue, release it when it is genuinely restricted, and then teach it to use the range it just gained.
What a Restricted Tongue Does
The tongue works all day and all night, and it does so without you noticing.
When it is tied down, the body compensates, and the compensations are what you feel. That is why the symptoms rarely point back to the tongue, and why most people spend years treating the compensations instead.
Common signs
A tongue-tie is there from birth. It does not develop over time, it does not stretch out, and it does not resolve on its own. If it has been restricting your tongue for thirty years, it has been shaping everything around it for thirty years.
Releasing the Tongue
The release is a frenectomy, a minor procedure that divides the band of tissue holding the tongue down. It is done in the office, under local anaesthetic, and it takes minutes rather than hours. Recovery is measured in days.
What it gives you is range. The tongue can now reach the roof of the mouth, and that is the whole point of doing it.
But range is not the same as function.
Why Therapy Follows the Release
A tongue that has been tied for decades has never learned what to do with freedom. The muscles have spent a lifetime compensating: the swallow recruits the cheeks and lips, the tongue rests low, the mouth breathes because the nose was never the default. Cut the tissue and none of that changes on its own. The tongue simply has more room to keep doing what it has always done.
Myofunctional therapy is what teaches it. It retrains the tongue to rest against the palate, to swallow properly, and to keep the lips closed and the breathing nasal. It also helps keep the released tissue from reattaching as it heals, which is a real risk when the tongue is not actively using its new range.
This is why we do not offer a release on its own. A frenectomy without the therapy that follows it is half a treatment, and the half that does less. Our two Qualified Orofacial Myologists, Victoria and Jesse, take it from there.
Do You Have a Tongue-Tie
Assessment takes training and clinical judgement, and no self-test replaces one. But if you are wondering, start here.
If any of those gave you pause, the next step is an assessment.
It takes one appointment, and it tells you whether the tongue is genuinely restricted, whether that restriction explains your symptoms, and whether releasing it is worth doing.
A tongue-tie is one piece of how the airway, the jaw, and the bite work together, and it sits inside our airway and sleep dentistry.
If the self-test gave you pause, or if you have spent years treating headaches, a sore jaw, or broken sleep without anyone finding the cause, an assessment is where it starts. Call (978) 922-4200 or request a consultation.