Teeth Clenching And TMJ
If you’ve been researching TMJ for some time and how to treat it, you’ve probably found one overall statement from every reliable source:
There is no real cure for TMJ.
The only thing doctors can do is give out strong pain relief medicines or muscle relaxation drugs. There is nothing else they can do.
Little by little, you get immune to the strong pain killers and other short term medications and they’ll stop working for you (if they ever did relief your pain in the first place).
Your dentists may try his best to help you by making a dental implant. These implants are mostly meant to save your teeth from grinding down. It is not a permanent cure and usually doesn’t relief the pain, although it may be well worth it to save your teeth.
The traditional health system has no cure for TMJ!
You can’t really blame them tough.
TMJ is one of the most complex conditions you’ll ever find.
Every TMJ patient has different original causes for his or her condition. And not only one cause or accident. There are probably several contributing factors causing your pain. Both physical and emotional.
Overwhelming feelings like stress, grief, or intense anger are often basic triggers of TMJ. Injuries, like car accidents or sport injuries are another common triggers.
You may not even have noticed at all when your condition began to develop. Maybe you bumped into something but didn’t give it a second thought. Few days later you began to experience pain. Most often, there is no way to know the original trigger.
Okay, that’s enough. Lets talk about what we DO KNOW!
What we know for a fact about TMJ is, the jaw joints are always misplaced in some way. It doesn’t necessarily have to be complete misplacement (although sometimes it is). Small wrong misplacement can be enough. And the symptoms can be both nerve racking and painful…
- Jaw locking opened or closed
- Uncontrollable jaw or tongue movements
- Clicking, popping jaw joints
- Clenching or grinding at night
- Grating sounds
- Inability to open the jaw smoothly or evenly
- Jaw deviates to one side when opening
- Inability to “find bite” with teeth
- Limited opening
- Frequent, migraine type headaches
- Extreme pain in cheek muscles
- Discomfort or pain to any of these areas
…are just few obvious symptoms. You may have some or all of them. Or non at all. Like I said, this is very complicated condition.
Another thing we know for a fact is, the jaw muscles are always very tense. It varies how painful they’re or if they’re torn but they’re always too tense. These weak, tense jaw muscles will push your jaw further out of position and make the problem worse.
This is similar to back problems. Most people who suffer from back problems have weak, tense muscles. The back problem may have started by using bad position when working, by minor injury, or something else that didn’t seem very serious at the time.
As self defense, the back muscles get tense to avoid the pain. This is unconscious and uncontrollable. That’s why you often see people with back problem walk bent. The back pain becomes chronic when, the tension in the back muscles actually push the spine out of place. What was only supposed to be temporarily pain relief has caused serious condition.
It’s no different with TMJ. Something that probably began as minor problem (maybe small bump on the jaw or period of intense feelings) is now becoming serious problem as the jaw muscles push on the jaw joints.
This, then leads to series of other problems.
Now the two jaw joints do not cooperate together. They’re unbalanced and uncontrollable. It shouldn’t really come as surprise that everything gets stuck. The pain is unbearable. It’s like begin constantly tortured.
Nerves get squeezed when the jaw joints are out of place. This is, for example, the reason many people suffering from TMJ experience loss of balance. The nerve system, controlling the jaw are directly connected to the nerves in the ear, where the function balancing your body takes place.
All the muscles in your body are connected. If one gets tense, all the muscles around that one become tense too. You’ve probably, for example, felt your shoulders and neck get stiffer as your TMJ grows worse.
Less noticeable is the tension in all the small muscles in your head. Including your other face muscles, tongue, throat and even eyes. You may also feel like your throat is narrower now than before (you’re not crazy it’s true).
You don’t have to imagine all the secondary symptoms this indirect tension from the jaw is creating. You’re experiencing some or all of them yourself…
- voice fluctuations
- sore throat without infection
- swallowing difficulties
- bloodshot eyes
- tongue pain
- balance problems, “vertigo”, dizziness, or disequilibrium
- feeling of foreign object in throat
- clogged, stuffy, “itchy” ears, feeling of fullness
- watering of the eyes
…plus endless other secondary symptoms, some people experience but others don’t.
The only way to reverse the development of TMJ and heal your self is to loosen up and strengthen both the jaw muscles and all the muscles around the jaw.
This does actually not require hard effort tough. The exercises are simple and easy to do. But you have to practice them if they’re are going to work for you.
- The jaw exercises strengthen and loosen up the jaw muscles directly. As you practice these exercises, the jaw muscles stops pushing the jaw into wrong position. Instead, it guides the jaw joints into right place and that way heals your TMJ.
- Consider how close the tongue is to the jaw. It’s no wonder how important it is to remove any tension from this muscle. You do that using simple tongue exercises.
- You probably noticed how many of the secondary symptoms had something to do with the throat. You’ll feel a whole lot better after you practise the throat exercises for few days.
- The neck and shoulder muscles are directly connected to the Jaw muscles. These muscles are usually the first one to freeze when the jaw muscles get stiff. They can, however, easily be put back into regular function using powerful neck and shoulder exercises.
- All muscles need oxygen to function properly. Stiff muscles, reduce the amount of oxygen they can process. Using specially designed breathing exercises, you can bring these muscles back to life, so they may begin to function properly again.
Most people who practice these exercises claim to get really good relief from them. Many totally heal their TMJ permanently. This is amazing, considering how complicated this condition is.
But before you celebrate, let me be brutally honest with you.
This will most likely take some time and effort. The exercises take less than 10 minutes a day on the average. But you must commit to them for some period of time. Some people literally get healed over night but that’s not the norm.
Your TMJ has been developing for years (even if the symptoms just showed up). So give the training few weeks. Even couple of months.
The muscles around the jaw must regain their old strength and flexibility. So must the jaw muscle itself. But that’s not enough. The jaw muscles must guide and lock the jaw joints into natural healthy position. This happens little by little (often fraction of an inch a day).
The fact remains, this is the only method proven effective to heal TMJ. Nothing else helps!
Do you want to learn more about these exercises and try some of them for free? If so, follow this link to cure TMJ permanently…
————————————————–
Christian Goodman is the founder of The TMJ No More Program. The program has helped thousands of people to cure their TMJ without having to undertake dangerous surgery, dental implant or having to buy and use drugs every day.
Tags: teeth cleanching, TMJ
