Jaw pain is no joke. It is a part of our body we use every day, whether we like to or not. It is used when eating, drinking, breathing (sometimes) and most of all speaking! Millions of people suffer from it every year in the US and it's hard to find ways to treat it (1)! Today I am hoping to shine a light on the Temporomandibular joint (TMJ), which is the only joint in our jaw and is the source of your jaw pain. With a better understanding of the joint comes better treatment, which leaves you with better and faster results because we can treat it right..the first time!
Three Ways To Treat TMJ Pain Without Surgery
Chiropractic Adjustments of the Neck
Manual Therapy on the muscles of the neck and jaw to decrease tightness
Jaw exercises to help increase motion and strength!
The Anatomy
The TMJ is a bi-condylar joint that is found beside both ears and works together each time you open and closes your mouth (1). There is a disc in this joint, just like the meniscus in your knee, that helps the joint move easier, but can also cause some problems (1). The jaw also has 6 types of movements it can do, forwards and backward, up and down, and side to side, which makes it a very complex joint and even tougher to treat (1)! There are also plenty of muscles that make the TMJ function. They are the temporalis, masseter, medial pterygoid, and lateral pterygoid, which control the jaw in all possible movements.
Types Of Disorders
The major player of TMJ pain is due to disc displacement (1). This is when the disc gets caught out of place in the joint causing it to be painful to fully open or fully close. In fact, almost 70% of people with TMJ pain have disc displacement (1). When the disc is displaced, the muscles surrounding the TMJ become dysfunctional due to the new movement patterns and need to be released with manual muscle therapy (2). Finally, excessive clenching or teeth grinding can cause some TMJ dysfunction due to overactive muscles of the jaw (3).
TMJ Pain Relief Treatments
There are several ways to treat TMJ dysfunction from non-invasive chiropractic care to complete TMJ joint replacement with surgical intervention. We will be focusing on non-invasive treatments as this is what would be used at Kinach Chiropractic! There are 3 areas that you can treat non-invasively, the neck, the jaw muscles, and the mouth. The neck is treated with high-velocity low-amplitude adjustments to ensure that the spine of the upper neck area is moving properly (2,3). Manual therapy is also a way to help with jaw pain reduction for TMJ disorders. There are different ways to approach manual therapy, either by focusing on the muscles directly or through a passive motion of the jaw by your chiropractor in order to help mobility (2,3). For the jaw muscles approach, releasing tension in the masseter, temporalis, and medial pterygoid is a good start, but the most important muscle to target is the lateral pterygoid (2,3). To regain motion in the jaw, using manual therapy to produce passive motion in the affected joint is preferred. This is because the patient is fully relaxed, and can reintroduce lost motion either by disc displacement, tight muscles, or both (2,3). These methods are both done by placing fingers inside your mouth, but are very effective! The last way to help treat TMJ disorders is by getting a splint from the dentist (3). This helps place the jaw in a proper position during sleep and reduces teeth grinding (3). There are also some exercises that can help with the TMJ that will come in another blog post. Having a multidisciplinary approach to treating TMJ is the best way to go!
Looking to get relief from your TMJ pain? Book an appointment TODAY!
Ingawale, Shirish, and Tarun Goswami. "Temporomandibular joint: disorders, treatments, and biomechanics." Annals of biomedical engineering 37 (2009): 976-996.
Chu, Eric Chun-Pu, et al. "Temporomandibular disorder treated with chiropractic therapy." Cureus 15.3 (2023).
Rubis, Lisa M et al. “A collaborative approach between chiropractic and dentistry to address temporomandibular dysfunction: a case report.” Journal of chiropractic medicine vol. 13,1 (2014): 55-61. doi:10.1016/j.jcm.2013.10.003
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