Privacy policy Legal disclosure Contact Home German. Fraenkel by Dr. James A. His many contributions to our specialty will be long lasting. He studied dental medicine in Leipzig and Marburg from to and began treating orthodontic patients with Angle's E-arch as early as He was a member of the staff of the oral and maxillofacial surgery department at a hospital in Essen for the next 2 years and then was engaged in private practice in Zwickau from though During the latter part of World War II, he was drafted to treat patients in the largest hospital for jaw and facial injuries in the country.
After the war, he returned to private practice in Zwickau, which had become part of the German Democratic Republic East Germany , isolating him from colleagues in the West. Rolf had become proficient in the use of functional jaw orthopedics, particularly activators, and had experienced both successes and failures with this popular European therapy. From this extensive experience by means of so-called functional appliances, he recognized that the stability of a treatment outcome can be expected to occur only if the structural and functional deviations of the muscular capsule could be corrected.
He evolved a unique approach to functional appliance therapy that incorporated the maxillary and mandibular vestibules as an operational base to reestablish an adequate size and shape of the orofacial capsule. Thus, in contrast to most other removable appliances, and certainly all fixed appliances, which place forces directly on the hard tissues, treatment with the function regulator focused primarily on the spatial inadequacy of the circumoral capsule as a major factor in restricting the displacement of the mandible and the maxilla, and thus its enlargement.
Therefore, early intervention with the FR appliance offers the opportunity to eliminate this restrictive effect, permitting normal displacement of the teeth and the facial bones. His 70 published papers also illustrated that a chief effect of FR therapy typically was expansion of the dental arches. He stressed, however, that the FR appliances were not true orthodontic appliances used to correct dental irregularities.
If the precise alignment of teeth is desired, treatment with fixed appliances is necessary. I met him for the first time at the Third International Orthodontic Congress, in London in , after he had presented a major lecture on his treatment approach.
