Find Out How to Feel Better With TMJ Treatment
There’s a lot of reasons for jaw pain. Sometimes it’s injury. Sometimes it’s just joint degeneration. Sometimes it’s just muscles. You know, there’s a lot of stress out there in the world, and a lot of people do take the stress out by clenching their teeth. Sometimes it’s how the teeth meet each other. You maybe have a great smile, but how your teeth are not playing nice together can contribute to muscle spasming, headaches, difficulty chewing, popping and clicking joints. So, what we need to do is just do a good assessment of where we think that source is coming from.
Then, that will give us the right avenue to help patients get out of any discomfort or concerns that they have about their jaw joints. So, as we’re evaluating a patient for what their jaw concerns are, it could be something as simple as making an occlusal guard that they wear at night. Sometimes it might be related to sleep apnea, where their jaw positions need to be in a different position so that they’re not snoring and their airway is not at risk. So, that could be another type of an appliance because bruxism or clenching and grinding your teeth is highly associated with sleep apnea. So, we always wanna rule that out as something that can be going on.
Oftentimes, joint pains can be a whole layer of things that are happening because of a trauma or something like that. You know, we certainly do want to find out what’s the most simple solution to take care of the problem, but we first have to kinda figure out what the problem is and why it’s happening, and then we can start addressing that. So we treat a lot of patients here with TMJ problems.