TMD Treatment

Do you often have pain in your jaw?

Do the muscles in your face feel sore or tired or ‘full’ all the time? 

When you get up in the morning does your face feel ‘tight’ or feel like you have been grinding your teeth or squeezing your bite closed all night long?

Does it take awhile to loosen it up for the day?

Do you often have headaches in the temporal area in the front of and above your ears?  How about the back of your neck? 

Have other health professionals had trouble isolating the source of your headaches? 

On top of that, do you have issues with the appearance of you smile? 

If any of this sounds familiar, read on.

One of the factors cosmetic dentists evaluate is the relationship between the jaw joint and how the teeth fit together.  This can be an issue for a large number of people with various degrees of severity in response to a less than ideal fit.  In short, in an ideal world when both of our jaw joints are in perfect position and we close our teeth together, all teeth would touch at the same time with equal intensity.  When one or both of our jaw joints move in any direction, our back teeth would immediately come apart and our front teeth would guide our jaw movement when any teeth are touching until the jaw joints are all the way back to full closure.  This natural ‘bio-engineering’ provides the most stable, harmonious environment for the jaw joints, the teeth, the muscles, ligaments, gum tissues, and bone. These issues can be remedied with TMD Treatment. 

TMJ or Temporomandibular Joint

When this system is operating in an uncoordinated fashion, we find that human beings have a variety of abilities to adapt.  Some of the manifestations commonly seen are wear on teeth, loose teeth, broken teeth, cracked teeth, gum tissue recession, bone loss around teeth, sore muscles in the face, temples and neck, headaches, stretched ligaments in the joints, and other degenerative effects.  This group of maladies is termed TMD, or Temporomandibular Dysfunction, named for the TMJ or temporomandibular joint.  Many patients know they have this problem and say ‘I have TMJ’.  The importance of this is that it is an underlying problem that should be treated, especially if you are considering aesthetic restorative dentistry and want a stable result.