Jaws, the mystery
Cansu Cender/Skull/www.basmatic.com/cansucender/Flickr
The alarm goes off, you turn over and slowly regain consciousness. But what is this? An earache so painful that it makes you reluctant to lift your head off the pillow.
If this sounds familiar, I wouldn’t be surprised. But what is an eye opener is the potential cause: temporomandibular joint pain dysfunction syndrome, or TMD for short.
You, and some 70% of the population, will suffer from it at one point or another in your lives. And it may manifest not just as an earache, but also as a headache, neck ache or pains down your back.
Now if this is beginning to sound like hypochondriac weekly, that is not the intention. I’ve just been amazed what a common problem it is, what are some of the common causes, and how it can be dealt with – yet how little coverage there is about it.
The temporomandibular joint operates as a ‘hinge’ which connects the skull and your lower jaw. It is the most used joint in your body and can become misaligned for a variety of reasons, stress playing a major part. You end up grinding your teeth in your sleep and wake in agony. You can even do yourself a mischief by chewing gum too vigorously.
If I get major teeth niggles, they happen over Christmas: time of mega stress. Seven years ago the dog nutted me on Christmas Eve and I ended up with root canal work in the New Year. The next year, with a houseful of guests, an unhelpful relative infected nearly all of us with the norovirus. And yes, come 1st of January, I woke with the mother of all earaches, and toothache. Luckily, I had a check-up due.
The solution, thank heavens, proved simple. The dentist made a cast and organised a splint which, when worn at night, corrects the misalignment, allows the jaw to relax, and prevents teeth from being ground down.
Some four years on, disaster struck. It’s been bad enough hunting for the gum shield on a Sunday when I’ve forgotten where I left it to dry after its weekly spring clean. This always occurred at midnight when all anyone wanted to do was head to bed.
Then I left it to soak in water at too high a temperature, so it lost its shape. The only solution, says the dentist, is to organise a new one. But for the moment, with stress held at bay, there appears to be no need for one.
And there are alternative solutions. I’ve been talking to a friend, Rob, who is a Bowen practitioner. This is a treatment that uses manipulation and massage. It is said to help realign muscles and ligaments to their correct position using a gentle rolling massage technique.
With TMD, the pain is often ‘referred’, which makes diagnosis problematical. Pain can even radiate through the shoulder blades and down the back. Rob told me of a patient who’d suffered constant back pain for years with nothing – neither chiropractic help, surgery or drugs – making a difference. Yet she emerged after one Bowen session walking tall and without pain.
So if TMD comes your way, play it safe. A cure may not necessarily involve pulling teeth (which happens all too often) but a splint or a gentle massage – or maybe try to avoid the stress in the first place!