Mouthpieces

Phyllis, I'm not sure that the Korean mouthpiece would pass muster in the United States.  Every doctor and nurse I have talked to says to put nothing in the mouth.  The force of the bite is so strong that people on these boards say that they have broken their own teeth during tonic-clonic seizures.  If someone tried to put their fingers in my mouth during a seizure I could bite their fingers--hard.  The only other way to put the Korean thing in would be to shove it in without being able to see what you were doing (assuming that you could get the mouth open wide enough)  At that point you could bend back the tongue and impede the airway, I think. It would be trickier still if the seizure has already started.  They may have already bitten their tongue and it may already be swollen.   (I'm not sure if the tongue swells right away--I'm kind of out of it for a while. :)) I just popped in my nightguard (shaped like one of the mouthpieces in your post) and bit down on my tongue.  a) it only protects from the upper teeth, whereas when I bite my tongue the bottom ones do a lot of damage and b) it might blunt the bite; instead of the sharp teeth edges biting down on the tongue, it spreads out the force of impact.  What this would mean to me is a wider bruise down my tongue, but a bruise nonetheless. The ones with grooves for upper and lower jaw would a) be hard to sleep in unless you could train your sleeping self to breathe through your nose and b) the hard ones would be more damaging if you actually bit down, because the guard for the lower jaw would be sharper than your actual molars. Soft ones are made of silicone, which I can see myself biting into little pieces and choking on.  In fact, we had a spare Shock Doctor mouthguard in the closet, so I just bit off a chunk.  (It wasn't bad but I prefer Wrigley's.) Oh, and here's something I didn't think of: http://www.epilepsyfoundation.org/forums/messageview.cfm?catid=11&threadid=55145&enterthread=y&STARTPAGE=2 Mom says her daughter's tongue thrusts during seizures push the darn thing out again. The Korean thing might work if the patient had a warning and could pop it in ahead of time (and duct tape it to their mouth?).  If someone tries it and it works, I hope they will make a million dollars selling it in the United States.   Best wishes from New Jersey PS I have no first-hand knowledge of the subject at all.  Whenever I'm around a T-C seizure, I'm unconscious.  nj