DelilahDeb
Posts: 429
Joined: 1/27/2008
Status: offline
|
I've been dealing with TMJ since 1981. Two of the primary causes of TMJ are
- a bad bite—your teeth don't line up well relative to their position in your jaw and how your jaw opens and closes.
A bad bite may just be the luck of the genes, but it may also occur because of injury to teeth or bone. I speculate that tooth decay, or eating around the pain of decayed teeth, may aggravate or cause a bad bite to levels where TMJ becomes noticeable.
- grinding your teeth—usually a symptom of stress.
- nighttime grinding during sleep—usually a symptom of extreme stress; a woman I knew who was diagnosed the same time I was had grown up with alcoholic, abusive parents, and had been grinding her teeth in her sleep from age 6 to age 35...by which time she had SEVERE arthritic degeneration of both jaw joints. Her treatment started with physical therapy for the myositis (muscle inflammation) of the jaw joints, went through braces to realign her teeth, and ended up with having her jaw surgically broken and realigned. And at that, she was lucky...the braces improved matters enough that she only (only!) had to have the upper jaw done instead of both (fixing the lower one would have meant wiring her jaw for 8 weeks). [footnote: this was a 3-year process, roughly]
What do you do? I'll tell you the things I know that can do some good and that don't require an MD or DDS to do.
- Use a smooth side of an ice cube (freeze a bit of water in a paper cup for a really smooth bottom) to rub over the outside of the jaw joints. This was the first thing I was assigned to do when I was diagnosed, along with a soft diet. No cruncy peanut butter, no hard candy, no chewy pizza, and at first, no serious chewing at all. Soups, pastas, stews, puddings, jello...puree the veggies and don't even think about crunchy salads, think gazpacho. Get a blender if you don't already have a food processor.
- Massage the muscles and tendons involved. You can do this easily from the outside, but many people don't think about the inside access. (A dom/me can use a sterile glove to do this, too...it's painful but productive if not done to extremes.) With your index finger (gloved with a cotton ball if you have long fingernails!), reach in one corner of your mouth and reach back and slowly up between the upper teeth and cheek. Turn your finger so that the pad is against your cheek and gently push upwards towards the jaw joint/earhole. You'll be able to feel tension in muscles and or tendons...push until mild discomfort, then rub the area, then remove finger. Repeat two or three times at first. Gradually you'll be able to do more and stretch further. Never push to the point of SHARP pain. You'll feel the stretch, and if the joint's inflamed, you'll need to go easy! Let the inflammation subside.
- Night grinders have no option if they want to survive this. NOTHING substitutes for a night guard. Nothing. I knew a lawyer once who chewed his way through custom night guards every six months. But it was better than not being able to chew.
- Finallly, an exercise for the small muscles of neck and shoulders in supprt of relieving TMJ-related stuff. (Learned this from phys therapy specific to TMJ.) Sit or stand straight and relaxed. Raise both arms to shoulder height, extended straight out, palms down. Now turn one palm up, and turn head towards that hand. SLOWLY, turn head to other side WHILE reversing hand positions (up to down, down to up). Reverse and repeat. After several reps, move head to face the down-facing palm, and do another set with the head turning from the down hand to the down hand.
Good luck with the dentistry. By the way, if there are any dental schools around you, sign up for practice victim. That used to be near-free in many places, and the dental students are basically interning under a fully qualified DDS.
Delilah Deb
_____________________________
"All acts of love & pleasure are My rituals."
--from the Charge of the Goddess, a Wiccan teaching
|
TMJ... - 
Profile
New Messages
No New Messages
Hot Topic w/ New Messages
Hot Topic w/o New Messages
Locked w/ New Messages
Locked w/o New Messages
Post New Thread