What is a Physiologic/Neuromuscular Dentist?
If someone told you they could help you sleep and breathe better, rid you of a lifetime of headaches, neck and back pain, increase your energy and stamina, and help you live a longer and happier life without medication, would you believe them?
Physiologic dentistry, also known as neuromuscular dentistry, is the science of aligning the lower jaw in relation to the upper jaw while creating a balanced and relaxed musculature of the head and neck in the process, without any surgery.
The lower jaw also called the mandible, is the bone that not only enables us to eat and speak, but it also has a major impact on our breathing, sleeping, and balance. It can often be the source of headaches and neck pain if it’s in the wrong position.
How Physiologic Dentistry Resolves Pain
You may still wonder how physiologic dentistry can resolve your pain without medication. The secret is understanding that nothing in your body is separate. All your muscles work as a team, and what affects one muscle affects all the other muscles in the team. When one muscle is stressed, it passes that stress on to the others. Soreness spreads from one to another, sometimes manifesting far from the source of the stress.
Your jaw muscles are the largest muscles in your head, so when they’re not functioning properly, everything in your head and neck can be thrown off balance. You can experience tension headaches, sore neck, and upper back pain–for starters.
And there’s one more layer to consider: the nerve that commands the jaw muscles is the trigeminal nerve, which is the trigger point for migraines. When your jaw muscles are stressed, it can contribute to overload in this vital nerve, setting off migraines. Branches of the trigeminal nerves even wind under and around the jaw muscles, so when these muscles are tense, they can also trigger migraines by pressuring the nerves. Some doctors want to treat this by cutting away those muscles or using drugs to relax them, but physiologic dentistry has a better solution.
Headaches = muscle tension, so why not just address the tension? By helping your jaw find a relaxed position, we can reduce tension in your jaw muscles, head, and neck. We can reduce your headaches and migraines–without drugs.
Finding the right TMD Doctor
At Downtown Dental, Dr. Clark has completed the post-graduate training to specialize in neuromuscular dentistry, which seeks to find to restore the ideal alignment of the bite and jaw. TMJ disorder can be one of the most challenging ailments to diagnose in all of medical science, and technological advancements provide yet another tool to successfully identify this disorder, which often afflicts its sufferers with chronic, debilitating pain.