Zoe Ball has spoken candidly about waking up with nasty headaches due to her underlying TMD, temporomandibular disorder; it appears she embarked on Botox treatment, which stopped the contraction of her cheek muscles, thus reducing the headaches.
People suffering from TMD present with a unique set of symptoms, including tender facial muscles, inability to open wide, painful yawning, migraines, or neck, shoulder and back pain. Then there are the more unusual symptoms like visual disturbances, ringing in the ears, earache, shooting pains down the arms and legs, twitching muscles and an inability to run properly.
The constant pain and not being able to get proper sleep regularly leads a person to introduce more and more pain-combating medication, which in turn is the slippery slope towards bouts of digestion turmoil and depression.
As TMD tends to go on for years if untreated, it can push people to the brink. Some feel they cannot continue their regular work routine and worry about the knock-on financial impact. Unsurprisingly, close relationships suffer when one partner is living with chronic pain. It’s especially difficult as pain is invisible, and TMD sufferers can feel like they are going mad, as attaining a diagnosis may be problematic.
When I started in dentistry almost 30 years ago, TMD was put down to hysteria. Since then, advancements have been tremendous, and although our understanding of the condition is still developing, the cause of TMD and its treatment is constantly improving. We now know it’s a complex syndrome, meaning that many different forces are at play influencing the condition.
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The advent of MRI imaging has allowed dentists to attain a clearer picture of the jaw joints and what’s happening. We are discovering that the pains and symptoms can come from what’s going on inside the jaw joints, from misalignments in the neck, airway problems and from our nervous system misfiring.
Botox injections mask TMD symptoms. Fortunately, we now have a combination of therapies to calm the head and neck area. TMD treatments incorporate a mix of dental remedies such as bite splints and restoring a person’s bite, calming down the sympathetic nervous system using various methods, exercise, breath and posture work, physiotherapeutic measures to balance the skeleton and, when appropriate, surgery.
Lucy Stock is principal dentist at Gentle Dental Care, gdconline.co.uk
