Dr. Martha Silva didn’t discover airway dentistry in a classroom. She discovered it as a mother who couldn’t find anyone willing to treat what she saw happening in her own children’s jaws. When traditional providers offered no answers, she designed a custom expander herself, found a lab to build it, and started treating her oldest daughter on her own. What she saw next changed the direction of her career: a daughter who had struggled to focus in school, who woke up tired despite sleeping all night, began to look and feel like a different child within months.
That firsthand experience is why Dr. Silva treats every patient like family. She has expanded the jaws of all four of her own children. She has had her own jaw widely expanded. She has personally undergone the same techniques she recommends to the parents who sit across from her, which means when she tells you what to expect, she is speaking from lived experience, not a textbook. At The Holistic Airway Dentist, we built our entire practice around the belief that many of the health struggles families accept as normal, from snoring to fatigue to difficulty focusing, connect back to one overlooked cause: how the jaw and airway developed.
You’re not imagining these connections. When your child snores, mouth-breathes, grinds their teeth at night, and struggles to focus during the day, these aren’t four separate issues requiring four different specialists. When you wake up tired after eight hours of sleep, can’t breathe well through your nose, and feel like you’re aging faster than you should, there’s a reason. Dr. Silva has spent her career learning to see what other providers miss, and she’s here to show you what changes when you finally address what’s really happening.
Dr. Silva spent nearly a decade practicing conventional dentistry before a mentor named Dr. Kevin Boyd, a Chicago pediatric dentist specializing in early jaw development, taught her to recognize red flags most dentists are never trained to see: enlarged tonsils, poor sleep, chronic allergies, kids who seem tired all the time. For years, she could spot the problem but had nowhere to send her patients. Then Dr. Izzy handed her a book about breathing, and inside its first chapter was Dr. Boyd’s own research. She calls it serendipitous. It sent her back to Dr. Boyd’s training, and this time, she came out able to treat the very children she’d been recognizing all along.
She still remembers the moment it became personal. Watching her own daughter’s face change after only a few months of treatment, Dr. Silva describes seeing a child who suddenly looked rested, vibrant, and present in a way she hadn’t before. That single before-and-after was enough to convince her staff, and it’s the story she now carries into every consultation. She has since gone on to earn Fellowship status with the Academy of General Dentistry, a distinction held by less than 2% of dentists, and joined Airway Health Solutions, an organization dedicated to advancing airway-focused care nationally.
Dr. Silva’s approach is additive, never subtractive. Where conventional orthodontics might extract teeth or shave down enamel to force a smaller fit, she expands the jaw to create the space that should have been there from the start. For children, that means working within the critical growth window between ages five and seven, when the most development is still possible. For teens and adults, it means customized Invisalign protocols that she personally reviews and revises, sometimes four or five times per case, because she believes every patient deserves a plan built around them rather than an algorithm’s default settings. Every recommendation Dr. Silva makes traces back to the same question she asks herself as a mother of four: what would I want for my own child?
