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Wavy Soul
USA
779 Posts |
 Posted - 01/21/2007 : 08:43:17
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Since the TMJ thread has devolved into a discussion of sex (in which I colluded) I want to bring it up top again.
The level of pain since my 24 hours of dental surgery (3 7-8 hour days!) has been debilitating. Haven't been able to eat solid food for nearly 3 months, and didn't need the weight loss this has created.
My dentist's suggestions for my pain were a hard night guard which made it worse, and painkillers which scare me.
So the other day I went to a dentist who works with the bite exclusively. He is rumored to have cured many people of many things by altering their bite (like MS and epilepsy
especially). One look at my teeth and he said that the teeth were hitting at the front, which meant that every time I try to chew my jaw muscles have to heave my jaw back in...
anyway, blah blah, he said it was fixable. He did a bit of adjusting with a drill. He said if this much was going to work, it would work, so go try eating. I went out and found I could eat crunchy foods! My bite was now much more functional BUT after blissfully gorging in a restaurant, I found myself with crippling pain again.
according to his protocol (which people rave about) there is something I can wear which adjusts the bite
The thing is, I am confused about whether this is really TMS. I have been doing everything as though it was TMS, except that "carrying on with normal life" isn't possible when I couldn't eat. The cautionary tale in the recent posts definitely woke me up, and the fact that the dental specialist immediately saw something structurally wrong was actually a relief.
Because this level of pain is absolutely not survivable for long. I don't care if it's TMS or "real" I just need it to stop.
My current belief is that it is a bit of both - part structural TMJ part TMS.
Any ideas?
Love is the answer, whatever the question |
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FlyByNight
Canada
209 Posts |
Posted - 01/21/2007 : 20:47:30
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KAtie
the only advice I can give you is from my personal Lay person experience and is to be very careful before entering neuromuscular dentistry... It is usually very expenseive and there are many schools of thoughts in that area ... 2 majors .. The LVI approach and the Schlavicech approach .... and one minor and less used approach that uses a front teeth guard called the NTI-Tension suppression system.
The LVI approach is the most popular in the USA. In my personal experience, the odds with this approach are that it will not work as expected as long as you have muscle spasms in your neck and jaw .... This approach uses a TENS muscle relaxation technology (myotronics) that only address the superficial muscles of the jaw / neck before adjusting the bite on the mouthguard. The problem is that most TMJ sufferers have spasms in deep muscles which are not targeted by the LVI stufff... Consequence ... if TMS is involved , your bite will be adjusted on the basis of underlying persistent muscular imbalance .... and youll get stuck in pain .... This is what happened to me and I had to pay many thousands of dentistry $$$$ to learn this
Getting your bite adjusted is a good thing in the final steps of your recovery. However, before getting your bite adjusted I strongly recommend that you try to find a way to shut down a bit your trigeminal nerve sensitivity which is often involved in the wrong sensory motor information that contributes to maintain the TMJ thing and get back some blood flow to the tmj area by means of TMS work .
P.
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Edited by - FlyByNight on 01/21/2007 20:54:38 |
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alexis
USA
596 Posts |
Posted - 01/21/2007 : 21:11:32
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Hi Wavy, since I described the steps I took already in the thread we contaminated (http://www.tmshelp.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=2962&whichpage=1) I will just add a little comment on my experience with adjusting. The first time I had it done was over 10 years ago when my teeth had been shifted from a sinus infection. The first adjustment session seemed great leaving the office, but wasn't totally perfect I realised by the next day. Next adjustment, a couple of days later, left me in great shape for years (and I learned that I need to stop chewing immediately when I get a sinus infection, but that's another story).
The second time I had a bite problem, however, I just kept getting adjustments so long that my teeth were filed down beyond recognition of my bite. It just kept on going. Finally the dentist and specialist refused to do more, and I had to just learn to deal with it on my own, as described in the other post.
I went though all of this before I really knew or worried about TMS, and I don't know either if it was TMS or not. I do know I got rid of it without knowing about TMS, though who knows if that might have led to the rise of other things. Still, nothing significantly bad showed up for several years. But worrying about the bite and how it all fit together did seem to put me into a cycle where I kept biting down to test how my teeth were fitting together, so in some ways it was TMS-like in that I was a bit obsessed.
I totally understand why you wouldn't care the origen right now. If you can get rid of it TMS-wise that's great. But this isn't in the "it causes no physical harm" category like some of these other things. Sorry if I didn't add much here...I know this is sucky.
I do wonder a bit if the pain you felt after the restaurant may not be so serious...but a hangover from damage you did with the bad bite. By which I guess I mean maybe gorging might be a little bit of a strain for recovering teeth and jaw? |
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Wavy Soul
USA
779 Posts |
Posted - 01/21/2007 : 22:41:19
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Thank you all so much. I'm taking it all in. Going to ask which school of NMDentistry I'm in.
Going to reread all this again tomorrow.
I love this intelligent forum!
Love is the answer, whatever the question |
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TMJ mystery
