On today’s Dental Minute I want to talk about something that can be challenging and painful for some patients. It’s TMJ pain. The temporomandibular joint is the joint that holds your lower jaw to the rest of your skeleton. It’s kind of like a hinge joint, a little disc there that the bone kind of goes up and over, and it’s a pretty complex joint. Often when you have pain there, it can be caused from a variety of factors. Occasionally, it is a skeletal problem and we do recommend surgery for that, but that’s pretty rare. A lot of times joint pain can be caused from other things. Patients sometimes clench and grind their teeth during the day, mostly at night. If you have a breathing issue, sleep apnea, you’re wearing some kind of device in your mouth while you sleep.That can cause joint pain.
If your occlusion, the way your teeth fit together, is malaligned, that can cause joint pain. There are a lot of other reasons for that. We can have inflammation in the chewing muscles. That can cause joint pain as well. If you have TMJ pain, you know it. It’s pretty uncomfortable a lot of the time. When we see you in our office for a TMJ appointment, we’re going to do an exam of the outside of the face and the oral structures. We’ll check and see how wide your mouth is opening, if it deviates to the right or left, if you have any inflammation in the joint, behind the neck, down the front of the neck. We’ll kind of see where we believe that the problem is stemming from.
There’s a multitude of options for treatment. A lot of times just a simple over-the-counter NSAID, ibuprofen or Tylenol can really help joint pain. We can also do some other prescription medications. A lot of times we’ll recommend dry needling or physical therapy or a chiropractor and we’ll refer you to the specialist in our area that we work with regularly. Another option is a bite guard. Often patients are doing damage to their teeth when they’re clenching and grinding and just wearing a simple bite guard can discourage that clenching and grinding and also protect the teeth from further damage. Often we’ll look at orthodontics, Invisalign or a referral for traditional braces in order to correctly align the bite and that can really help resolve TMJ pain.
If none of those work, we will send you to a TMJ clinic out of town, and a lot of times that’s a great place for you to go. What I want you to take away from this is you have a lot of options and you don’t have to suffer through TMJ pain all by yourself. Give us a call ay (270)685-1777 or come in and see us and let’s figure out what’s going on.