Find Out How Our TMJ Treatment Can Help
TMJ is a term that we’ll have patients use and it just stands for your Temporomandibular Joint, but what we find is people have TMJ symptoms when they have sore, painful joints or pain in their face. That often is caused from a variety of things. One big one is from grinding our teeth, so I have patients who have what we call bruxism, but it’s just tooth grinding. They may do it in their sleep, or during the day, or both, but what can cause the muscles in the joint to have some pain and inflammation. We treat that. There’s a variety of ways, but with a thorough assessment to determine what’s the cause. If we determine the cause is truly the grinding, a bite guard is made, special custom, small device, easy to wear, that you wear at nighttime, and can alleviate a lot of those symptoms.
If there’s someone that’s suffering from more complicated TMJ issues, sometimes there’s issues inside the joint itself. We also treat that here at Houston Uptown Dentist. There are different therapies for that and that can include laser therapy or split therapies depending on the need. Sometimes it’s a day and a nighttime split combination to help minimize the inflammation of the joint. It’s very debilitating to have jaw joint pain. It’s hard to chew and eat well. Some patients even have a hard time speaking or have pain in their ears. To alleviate that, it’s a life changing event for a patient. We can work with patients who are having these symptoms and find a good result.