Very successful care for pain relief
There’s kind of two avenues of TMJ. There’s TMJ, which is jaw joint pathology or breakdown, actually within the jaw joint, like a knee, like a shoulder where the joint disc, the cushion between the ball and the socket has displaced. And that’s what causes the popping and clicking that so many people have with TMJ.
And then there’s the other aspect where people don’t have jaw problems inside the joint that are more of what’s called myofascial pain and clenching and grinding and those types of aspects, overall total facial pain and neck and cervical pain. Now, the people with popping and clicking in their jaw also with clenching and grinding, then they got the full meal deal. The very first thing we decide is, is this person an intracapsular problem or an extracapsular problem? Does this person have a healthy joint or not a healthy joint? And if it’s just clenching and grinding and that kind of pain, that’s very straightforward, very, very successful treatment.
And even the ones who have popping and clicking discs, it goes a little bit longer because besides the pathology and the soreness they have from clenching and grinding and those symptoms, you have to treat the joint because underlying this, if you’ve got problems within the joint, so-called slipped discs, you have neurologic signals being sent out of that joint, telling the facial muscles to splint whether you’re clenching or not is the source of the pain. But in both cases, even though we use different types of splints, usually we’re using some type of splint positioning of the jaw to heal the jaw joint or to break that, that constant habit of clenching and grinding, and especially on grinders who wear their teeth down and fracture their teeth, it prevents that from occurring. So very, very successful.
We’ve established ourselves as a regional treatment center for TMJ in northwest Indiana for over 45 years. I’m going to get patients from Indianapolis all around the northern part of the state, even medical doctors who’ve gone through their diagnosis, MRIs, ear evaluations. You go out, go see your dentist, boom, they finally send them to us.
We’ve hopefully worked enough with those people to say, don’t spend all that time and money on barking up that tree. If they have a popping and clicking jaw and facial pain, get them to us right away because we’re very successful at treating TMJ pain.