Non-Nutritive Sucking

Hello everyone, I hope you are all well and enjoying the summertime. Before I begin, let me firstly thank you for your continuing support. With your help, we have been able to update our digital imaging equipment, allowing us to utilise the latest software for dental imaging, diagnosis and education.

Further to this, I ask you to join me in extending a warm welcome to our newest team member, Noieeda. Noieeda's duty will to be ensure your experience with us is first class and if you haven't met her already, we hope you will meet her soon. Noieeda has a background in teaching, so is new to working within health care; she is friendly, dynamic, personable and oh, she is also our sister!

Nutritive sucking occurs when our babies suckle or feed from the bottle; Non-nutritive sucking (NNS) is a generic term for any non-feeding sucking habits, such as dummy or thumb sucking. It is well established that prolonged NNS can lead to changes in facial and dental growth. At the practice, we have treated many young patients with braces in order to correct these anomalies.

Over the last decade, I have developed my interest in facial development and orthodontics - spending many hours studying the subject with some of the leading experts from around the world. I formed the view that it would be best to steer clear of dummies when I started a family. Recently I have had the opportunity to test this view and I can tell you that three days after the birth of my daughter, I drove to our dental practice at 3am and scooped all of the orthopedic dummies from our display!

Our daughter (I suspect like many babies) has a strong urge to suckle and we couldn't fight it. We have started to reduce her use of the dummy and hope to stop completely before she is six months old. Wish us luck