TMJ Ear Pain

TEMPORO-MANDIBULAR-JOINT

TMJ Ear Pain is elusive and often quite unexpected. Because the brain stem nuclei that supply the jaw muscles and the face are united with those of the neck muscles, the Temporo-Mandibular Joint, the jaw joint, can mimic cervico-genic headache and neck pain. It can also cause severe face pain.

It is no coincidence that TMJ pain is often confused with ear pain.

Why is the Temporo-Mandibular Joint (TMJ) so important? How is it that TMJ ear pain can be one of the most painful of conditions? Because you use it in speech, eating, tasting, kissing! ... Having to work in a civilised manner with a partner some distance away on the other side of the skull gives special engineering difficulties for the TMJoints. Harmony between them is essential, and estrangement is common. Divorce is impossible! Until death do us part.

Thus the Temporo-Mandibular Joint has an unexpectedly large representation in the brain. Coordinating the tongue, the lips, swallowing, breathing and the jaw joints is no small task for the brain. Consequently there are a large number of mechano-receptors, and noci-ceptors in all these structures, giving the brain precise information about what is where, and about balance and movement. Otherwise you might accidently bite your own tongue off or break a tooth on an olive pip!

The coordination of all these parts is done via nerve impulses from the mechano-receptors in these tissues that are processed by the small-brain or cerebellum.

In this bizarre picture below you can see how in the cortex of the brain the sensory area (called the homunculus) gives the hands, lips, tongue, face, jaw joint and ear enormous representation.

Christmas sale

"Frog in my Throat was fun and I like the definition the author gives at the end of his book, excellent."

- Dr Ben Bolsenbroek, Chairman, Netherland Chiropractic Association.

Go to OurSTORE.

PAIN

Trigeminal Neuralgia

It can be caused by pressure on the nerve from a tumor, or from a pulsating artery, and from a disruption of the normal gait in the TMJ’s. The cervical spine is not normally considered as one of the causes of this nasty condition but, because of the Trigeminal Spinal nucleus, these abnormal impulses often stab not only into the face, but over the scalp and into the neck. Or can they emanate from the neck also? As chiropractors we feel that the neck may be intimately involved in TMJ ear pain.

See the Trigeminal Spinal tract? It carries pain and sensations of warmth and cold from the jaw joint to the Spinal Trigeminal nucleus in the neck.

The two long structures in dotted lines are the two complete sensory Trigeminal nuclei, right and left. They are enormous, the trigeminal nerve having more nerve material than all the other cranial nerves together. The two heavy black arrows at the top are the impulses being carried to the sensory cortex where you experience all the normal activity of the face, jaw and neck, and all this potential pain.

Can you understand the complexity of TMJ ear pain?

Notice how the Trigeminal nucleus reaches right down into the upper cord, becoming continuous with the Posterior horn, and receiving input from the upper neck. The cauliflower is the great coordinator, the cerebellum. It enables your jaw muscles to automatically ease off just before your molars grind down and smashing into each other whilst chewing.

This is a hopeless complex condition that few doctors can cure, but some can help. I like to think chiropractors have a part to play. It's certainly worth consulting a chiropractor who works with both the spine and the TMJ before acceding to medicine's final solution - surgically severing the Trigeminal Spinal Tract, deep within the brain in an attempt to relieve the pain.

From the coal face

"Rush and hurry are not of the devil. They are the devil!"

(Well, not theologically sound, but you get the drift).

Only yesterday I was treating a man with chronic headaches and facial pain, (patients don't walk into the office saying, Doc, I have TMJ Ear Pain!) but after four visits there had been only minor improvement. At the initial consultation he had also complained of upper neck pain where I certainly found fixations, and blithely assumed they were the source of his headaches. They probably were - in part. But the neck joints were moving much more freely after four adjustments, yet there was little improvement in his headache symptoms. Was it TMJ ear pain? Bingo!

At his first consultation it had been a very stressed and busy day. I had six new patients that day, a record for me, and my examination of the man was found wanting.

On further examination, I quickly discovered a fixation in his left jaw joint, causing a tiny click in the right TMJ and an exquisite active trigger point in a tiny hidden muscle called the External Pterygoid. Probably the result of an old rugby injury. He'll get better.

We have a saying in health care.

"If you don't look for it, you won't find it".

I hadn't look!

There's nothing simple about TMJ ear pain.

For more about what you do can do to help yourself, if you suffer from what you think may be a TMJ syndrome, click here.

To go from TMJ ear pain to the HOME PAGE of BERNARD-PRESTON.COM