Gorgeous Healthy TMJs = Gorgeous Smile?

By Jeffrey L. Brown, DDS

When your Temporomandibular Joints (TMJs) are healthy and happy, you are too. This joint is perhaps one of the most important joints in the human body.

It allows us to eat, speak, laugh, yawn, and tends to be working all day long. For this reason, it is more readily damaged than many other joints. Even if you are an athlete whose body is moving and exercising for most of the day, your jaw joints are moving as well. This can lend them to damage and this leads to inflammation that can affect your entire body. This does not include contact sports.

Because of the delegate nature of the joints structure, the TMJs happen to be one of the most misunderstood joints in the human body. Most doctors would tell you that medical or dental school did mostly a cursory discussion of this very important joint. Yet when it is not working properly, it can wreak havoc with your entire body. This might seem far-fetched, but there are many cases in which a displaced TMJ disc can affect other parts of the body not just typical headaches, jaw pain or neck pain. The pinched nerves or blood vessels can affect the knee, the shoulder, the hip, and even the arch of the foot. Our office has seen these cases on so many occasions that it is no longer any oddity when the patient reports running is an option again. The reason is because the TM joints are well supported.

When a person has a TMJ problem, it is absolutely critical to diagnose the problem with an MRI. Unfortunately, most radiologists would admit that they have little to no experience in reading an MRI of the jaw joints. This is why you must seek a dentist or MD who has the radiologist with the expertise to read the images from the MRI. Our radiologist at the imaging center has the ability to identify disc degeneration which is a critical component in deciding how to treat the person.

The next factor is something called ‘condylar angulation’ which means how the top of the jaw bones is angled relative to each other. The next diagnostic item needed is the CBCT x-ray. This is critical to diagnosis. With the MRI and the CBCT x-ray information, it becomes easier to identify the problems and treat them accordingly. This is the key to success: properly identify the displacement and prepare for proper treatment.

It is amazing when you see the progression of someone who has suffered from TMJ disorder for many years and now function with a smile once again. Our office has countless cases of people who went from being disabled to being back to work and feeling themselves again. The before and after photos that are done clearly show how the head is straighter, the neck is aligned, the eyes and face are brighter, and the person can now smile!

Their Gorgeous Smile is there because of the now Gorgeous Healthy TM Joints!