TMJ Treatment

All the years, we have become very familiar with and specialized in treating the temporomandibular joint. Everybody knows it as the TMJ. It's the joint that simply hinges our lower jaw to our head. It's a joint like your knee, hip, or elbow. You could imagine if other joints were out of a line, it might be uncomfortable. What TMJ treatment actually refers to is, is there a way to get that particular joint working comfortably like Mother Nature intended? That's our goal. We have a lot of different treatment modalities to accomplish that. Some are simple and some may be more advanced. People call all the time and say, "I think I might have a TMJ problem." So we have them in, and we give them certain questions that give us information about, are they a candidate maybe for a possible TMJ treatment? How do we know that? Well, there are some telltale signs. Pain in the joint is one of them. But a lot of times we wear our teeth down as we get older, and it's from clenching and grinding. Our teeth weren't meant to wear down. They were meant to stay the proper length our entire life. Or a really common complaint is headaches. It's amazing to me how many people have headaches and have put up with them for years. A lot of them complain that they've had severe migraines for years. TMJ treatment is not like other treatments that patients might be aware of. The diagnostic process can be a couple of appointments, wearing our TMJ splint for what we call therapy. That can be three or four months. Then treatment after that varies from patient to patient, depending on the extent and the health of their teeth. It could be a matter of very minor treatment, or it could be a matter of more advanced treatments. As far as TMJ treatment itself, it's really not uncomfortable. Usually everything gets more and more comfortable, so there's not really a recovery period. There is what we call a maintenance period, because after we get someone comfortable, and we do the recommended treatments to continue to provide that comfort, we like to have patients wear a night guard or some device, really at night for a long period of time, just to maintain their comfort over time. There's a lot of benefits to TMJ treatment. I think the first one is getting out of pain. Pain can be the joint popping, or it hurts when you chew, or it can be a headache, or you can have stiff neck, all kinds of issues. The first benefit is to feel better. I think the second longer-term benefit, which is probably more important, is once you get the joint functioning like it should, like Mother Nature intended, you're going to prevent pain from returning, most likely. But also, you don't want that joint to continue to break down. It's not like a knee where you keep running and it breaks down, you got to get a new knee replacement. We don't do that with TMJ. We want to maintain it, so it's comfortable for a lifetime.