Orofacial Myofunctional Therapy in the Age of Social Media: When Trends Outpace Evidence

Orofacial myofunctional practices now circulate widely on social media, often reaching patients before any clinical assessment, yet critiques of online misinformation tend to treat these trends as a single problem. This article draws on a narrative review of peer-reviewed literature and consensus statements, interpreted from the standpoint of clinical practice in orofacial motricity. Four distinct patterns of mismatch between claims and evidence are proposed: a plausible but untested intervention (nocturnal mouth taping, evaluated in ten studies, all of poor quality); a valid construct stretched beyond its evidence (tongue resting posture recast as adult facial remodelling, or “mewing”); a legitimate procedure whose indications have outpaced the data (frenotomy); and a device presented as a substitute for therapy (prefabricated myofunctional appliances). Some current misconceptions are traced to the field’s own literature, and in obstructive sleep apnoea, the evidence for orofacial myofunctional therapy itself is of very low to moderate certainty. Each pattern calls for a different response: trials, conceptual precision, assessment thresholds or resistance to substitution. The credibility of orofacial myology depends on applying to its own claims the standards it demands of popular trends.