The Man the GDC Cannot Silence
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- Published: Tuesday, 27 May 2025 10:17
- Written by Peter Ingle
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In the changed world of mass communication, once restrictive rules have been torn up by influencers and social media. It has never been easier for those with unorthodox or anti-establishment opinions to reach a huge audience.
The Michael Mew story has moved on from the disputed concepts of Orthotropics, to a more personal one of an individual’s struggle against a powerful establishment. His registration may have been erased by the GDC, but the man described as the world’s first viral orthodontist retains enormous influence. The mewing subreddit, “Anything and everything related to mewing,” has 64,000 members. His YouTube channel has more than half a million subscribers. The Ultimate Mewing Guide alone has attracted 9 million views since it was uploaded a year ago. The GDC might feel a sense of achievement in preventing him seeing a comparatively miniscule number of patients in person, but to take a single example, his 4 step guide to mewing remains on YouTube and is approaching 500,000 views.
Despite this, his latest successful outreach comes not via Instagram or TikTok, but in the house journal of the regulatory classes, The Guardian. GDC staff perusing the Life and Style pages over their coffee may be taken aback to see a 2000 plus word story about a man, and indeed ideas, that they have worked for decades to cancel.
The story comes with the attention grabbing headline, ‘There’s no excuse for ugly people’: controversial dentist Mike Mew on how ‘mewing’ can make you more attractive./
After describing his ‘strange mouth exercises’ as ‘beloved by incels’ comes the question, “So why has he been struck off the dentist’s register.” The story is based on an interview with Mew as he goes about the final stages of setting up a studio in his house. “Then I can sit here and I can change the world” he says./
Algorithm driven social media has caused mewing videos to be seen billions of times on TikTok alone, and while it started with boys, girls are now doing it too. The paper gives an outline of the Mew family’s orthodontic crusade, culminating in Michael’s recent erasure. The register now shows him as suspended, as he has lodged an appeal against the decision to erase him. Those doubting the GDC’s resolve might note that their website shows his period of suspension running until November 5th 2124./
Mew tells the reporter that he believes the disciplinary investigation against him was ideologically motivated. He also, according to the reporter, managed to appraise the attractiveness of her face four times, “entirely unbidden.” A picture emerges of someone with few filters. Some of the children who he saw at his clinic are described as “little shits”. He makes some challenging generalisations about beauty, and some similarly questionable claims about health. But he can point to a simple question that traditional orthodontics struggles to answer: why do so many people in the developed world now have misaligned jaws and teeth?
In the course of their long interview, Mew claims that “almost certainly over half the children in the developed world” are needing orthodontic treatment. He sees two main reasons for this, softer food requiring less chewing resulting in weaker jaw muscles, and “an epidemic of mouth-breathing.” The Mew approach to dealing with the effects of this is demanding, recommending that his YouTube viewers mew whenever they are not talking or eating.
As the interview progresses, the reporter asks Mew for evidence that links stop-start breathing during sleep with malocclusion. Their eventual conclusion is that, “When it comes to hard evidence, Mew can be frustratingly vague.”
The article runs through the three counts that led to Mew’s erasure. It notes that in the first case the parents were very happy with the outcome, and that the referral to the GDC came from a hospital consultant not directly connected with the treatment. The second count did relate to a complaint from a patient’s parents, however the third count may reveal more about the GDC’s failings than Mew’s.
In the third count, the GDC claimed Mew stated in a YouTube video that creating enough space for the tongue can influence “expansion of the brain, expansion of the dental arches as well”. To quote Guardian journalist Jenny Kleeman: “But when Mew shows me the video and I hear his words in context, it’s clear to me that he is making a joke: he’s saying if people change their mindset and are open to new ideas, their dental arches might expand, too. Still, the GDC ruled against him on all counts and he lost his licence to practise.”
Michael Mew’s appeal against the ruling will reach the high court during summer 2025. Irrespective of the outcome, his theories appear destined to continue to spread globally.
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