Is It Your Turn Yet?

Is It Your Turn Yet?
April 2009

You Give Me A Headache!

Have you ever heard these words spoken or said them yourself? Do you know people, that when stressed, get head pain and soreness around the mouth, the neck and temples?

Between 10 million and 175 million people suffer from a very common, but vaguely defined disturbance named “TMJ Disorder”. TMJ means Temporal Mandibular Joint which is a hinge that your lower jaw uses to open, close and move sidewards. It is a balled socket located on both sides below your ears. If you have tension headaches, clicking in your ears with pain, or limited opening of the jaws, you may suffer from the problem.

There’s much good news/bad news about TMJ. The good news is that the primary cause of pain is fatigued muscles so that if we just relaxed, not clench or grind our teeth, many times (even if we have problems in the joint itself) we won’t have significant pain. The bad news is that many of us clench our teeth and when we do the stress on the jaw is ten times the force of normal chewing while eating. This pressure from clenching decreases the available oxygen to the pillow which cushions your jaw joint, choking off the nutrients. Then, when we open and don’t clench, the body’s repair system comes in to clean up the destruction, sometimes taking away valuable tissue in the process.

The other good news is that this problem can many times, be controlled with good diet, nutritional supplements, exercise, low stress environment and decrease in caffeine. The bad news though, is without a healthy lifestyle, this syndrome can be devastating to some people.

This syndrome can affect most anyone from age three to the elderly, although the most prevalent group is females ages 20-50. The research is not clear on why females are afflicted more, but it may be a combination of having smaller jaws (they are less supporting) and they may internalize some stress more than males (or from the female’s point of view, the men in the world cause the stress…the females are the recipients).

I have found the problem with treatment of TMJ to be analogous to someone walking on top of a wall. Pain comes in TMJ when you “fall off a wall” and so it is not all the time that you would have pain.

Today is the first day of the rest of your life.

Article written by: Dr. Daniel L. Steinke