TMJ stands for Temporomandibular Joint (the jaw joint), and is also used to refer to Temporomandibular Joint Syndrome, a painful disorder of this joint. One of the most common and painful of its symptoms is headaches, often thought of as migraines.
When we close our mouth and our teeth come together, that's referred to by dentists as our bite, and it's the result of the way our jaw joint operates. A bite can be well-aligned or poorly aligned. When it's misaligned the jaw muscles become strained trying to bring the teeth together properly, as we open and close our mouths so many thousands of times a day for eating, talking, swallowing, yawning, laughing etc.
What causes a misaligned bite?
Misaligned bites are caused by many varying factors. It can start in infancy, with airway obstrucition. Allergies that affect breathing, crooked teeth, or hereditary mouth conditions, or even a head injury which disrupts the jaw joint can all cause a poorly aligned bite.
TMJ Headaches Explained
1. Several large nerves, with many branches, run through the face, head, neck, and shoulder area. One is the trigeminal nerve, one of the large pairs of cranial nerves which run from the spinal cord, in between spinal vertebrae, and forward into face area. It gives the brain about 40% of its daily work and as its name implies, has three branches. Each branch has sub-branches.
2. When the jaw joint is misaligned, the muscles attached to it become tired and strained over the months and years, as they try to close the mouth correctly. They end up in perpetual spasm, never relaxing. This often leads to chronic teeth clenching or grinding, even at night during sleep. (This sometimes works the other way around too, where emotional stress causes teeth clenching, which eventually puts the jaw joint out of alignment.)
3. Perpetually tense jaw muscles create swelling and inflammation in the area, which puts pressure on the nerves. We feel this as pain. So whichever part of the nerve is being compressed, in the temple, neck, shoulder, etc., that's where we feel the pain.
4. TMJ therefore has a wide variety of symptoms, such as earaches, sore jaws, neck and should pain, and tingling in the fingers. The most painful and incapacitating symptom is headaches.
Why neuromuscular dentists can help
If you have been suffering from severe headaches, you may have visited several doctors trying to get them treated. You may have taken a variety of painkillers, but found that nothing eliminates this pain.
If your headaches are a symptom of TMJ, you need to see a neuromuscular dentist, one trained in treating not just teeth and gums, but also the jaw joint, along with its muscles, nerves, and ligaments. This is not training that the average dentist receives in dental school. It is post-graduate training, and relatively few dentists have completed it.
One neuromuscular dentist in the Los Angeles area is Dr. Joseph Henry. In explaining how he approaches patients with TMJ symptoms, he said:
I look at the relationship between the jaw joint, its muscles, and the position of the teeth. Misalignment in any of these has a direct effect on the whole system of opening and closing the jaw.
Finding your relaxed jaw position
The first step a neuromuscular dentist would take to determine whether your headaches were a TMJ symptom or not, would be to test, record, and measure your jaw movements. In this high-tech age, dentistry has moved right along with other professional fields in developing sophisticated equipment, using lasers and computers. The goal of testing and measuring your jaw movements is to find your relaxed, natural jaw position, your natural bite.
When the dentist has found your relaxed jaw position, the goal of your treatment is established, namely, to make this position permanent, thus abolishing the painful symptoms of misalignment.
Says Dr. Henry:
"A neuromuscular dentist can realign a patient's bite. Once the relaxed position is known, treatments can begin to make this relaxation permanent. We might create a custom orthotic for the patient to wear which will re-train those jaw muscles. We might plan some tooth re-shaping, or re-aligning, even a full orthodontic treatment if necessary. Each treatment is individual to that patient."
Headaches can be a thing of the past if you follow through with your visits to a neuromuscular dentist. You'll be smiling with relief and pleasure - especially if some of that dental treatment gave you a more even, brighter smile as well as pain relief!
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