Hi there, I’m Dr. Jason Mounts. Today I’d like to visit with you about some issues that some folks have. That have some very difficult symptoms to diagnose. It can be very confusing and that’s TMJ. People have come to my office before, kind of as a last resort. Wanting to know what’s wrong. They’ve been to their doctors, they’ve been to their chiropractors, and they can’t figure out what’s wrong. They are having headaches or they think they have an ear infection or different things like that, but everything checks out clear.
So, then those folks tend to refer them to us. To let us check out and see what kind of problems they’re having. Lots of times it turns out, even though, sometimes it feels like a toothache lots of times. It turns out that these folks are having problems with their TMJ. Now what the TMJ is, it’s actually just your jaw joint. It’s just a fancy initials for it but when people start having symptoms there, that joint is a very complex joint. One of the most complex in your body, actually. So, there are lots of different things that that can go wrong and start causing symptoms in that joint.
So, sometimes people get headaches, sometimes their jaw hurts when they try to open wide or they yawn. Sometimes their jaw will try to lock up on them or it hurts when they try to chew. Sometimes they just have kind of random pain in their jaw or in their cheek that almost mimics a toothache. So, they’ll come in and visit with us about it and after we kind of rule out some other things. We’ll determine that they’re actually having problems with their TMJ. So, there are lots of different symptoms that go along with that and on the other side of that, there are lots of different ways that we can help fix that, lots of different things that we can do to help alleviate the pain. Sometimes as easy as just changing your diet up for a little bit or sometimes in levels of high stress the TMJ problems get worse.
So, we start to decrease the stress levels. Those things get better and sometimes it’s that way because people clench or grind their teeth. That causes some problems so sometimes we end up having to make a little appliance, like a little mouth guard, for people to wear to help things get to feeling better. But if you’ve ever noticed that you’re having frequent headaches or if you have sensation around your ear, but you know you don’t have your infection or if you notice popping and clicking in your jaw with pain associated with that. If you’re having those kinds of things. Give us a call. We’d be glad to have you come in, take a look at it and see if it might possibly be some TMJ issues and see if there are some things that we can do to help you out with that to make you feel better. You can give us a call at 501-653-0166