Jaw pain part 1: What is TMD?

Do you or someone you know suffer from jaw pain? 

Jaw pain is more than just a pain in the face, it can affect nearly every moment of your life, from talking, eating, exercise and even sleeping! 

Not to mention how annoying the noises it makes and headaches it causes can be. 

We see a lot of people with temporomandibilar dysfunction (or TMD) but we find a lot of people don’t really know what it is, whether it can be helped and most importantly, haven’t thought about the far reaching impact TMD can actually have on their lives. 

We hope you enjoy our 3 part series on TMD. In this first video, Martin explores exactly what TMD is, as well as discusses the day to day implications that a dtysfunctioning jaw can have on your life. 

As always, the video has been transcribed below. 

Hi, Martin here from Align Chiropractic and today I wanted to talk to you about an issue that we see very commonly in our practice which is TMD or temporomandibular disfunction, a really long difficult name essentially saying that your jaw isn't working right.

Now when we talk about it you’re jaw not working right or TMD, there's a bunch of different symptoms or signs that somebody could have that they have TMD, the one that brings people most commonly to us is that they've jaws painful. 

It's difficult chewing, it's difficult biting, it can also be that it's difficult to open your mouth fully or in some people it can't even be that it's difficult to fully close you mouth and bring your teeth together and even that the teeth feel like they're a little bit off center or even that the whole system's a bit out of whack. 

Some people will have clicking, either in combination with the other symptoms or just by themselves their jaw clicks the whole time and that can be really annoying, while some people will have it not really causing pain but part of the reason that they're actually getting headaches as TMDs are a really common contributor to people who get in particular tension type headaches. 

So it's something that we see very very commonly in our practice and we've done a lot of post graduate training in specific approaches in terms of how to address it, but when you have TMD a lot of people think of it before they have it as just being about the pain but for most people it makes them super aware of how much impact your jaw has on life overall. 

When you have jaw pain it effects eating, it can affect talking, it can affect sleeping it can affect your ability to exercise and so when it's affecting all of those things it then affects lots of different aspects of our life. 

Some people will find that it's much harder to work or they can't really work at all, they'll find that it impacts their roles in their family, as I said before it makes exercise a lot harder, a lot of people find that it impacts their social life because if you can't eat or you can only eat certain foods and it’s difficult to talk, you don’t really feel like getting out connecting with your friends and family. 

So TMD is a serious issue that can have wide-ranging effects on people who experience it and it’s something that we would highly recommend that if it’s troubling you, you make an appointment to do a comprehensive assessment so we can develop a plan to really get things back on track for you.

So, if you'd like help with that, please give us a call today so that we can get you started on having your life back, not being impacted by ongoing issues with your jaw.