A lot of patients who have chronic jaw pain, a lot of times they don’t understand there’s a solution for that. Most of the patients are misinformed, malinformed. They don’t think there’s a solution.
They just think it’s been, hey, since I was like an 18-year-old, I’ve been grinding my teeth. They’re just normal. My dad did that, my mom did that, so it’s just normal.
But that’s not the case. Chronic jaw pain can easily be avoided. Routine examination, when they come to our practice, we always do TMJ consult, you know, we always do TMJ examination to tell the patient.
Basic, simple thing, do you have any popping sounds, any sensitive teeth, any kind of, any sort of jaw pain? That’s the most important question. Yes, every now and then I have jaw pain. A lot of the solutions are very simple, very simple, such as reducing the caffeine intake.
Too often patients have caffeine after a certain point in the day. They are grinding their teeth at night, and their patterns of sleep is off. So we usually tell the patient that, we do a lot of the sleep studies here.
We would advise a patient to get the sleep study done, make sure, is it jaw pain related to the sleep, not having proper sleep? And too often patients, once they know if it’s causing by the lack of having a proper sleep, and you get a proper sleep, that jaw pain can slowly, gradually go away. And some patients who just grind their teeth, it has nothing to do with the sleep pattern. They just grind their teeth, or they clench their teeth.
That’s where the TMJ, our office is capable of handling the pain for the patient with TMJ, after ruling out whether it’s not caused by sleep apnea or lack of proper sleep.
