Home TMJ Treatments

Treating TMJ is often done in multiple steps. TMJ treatments can range from simple home care solutions to more serious surgeries depending on the severity. If doctors have a fault, it is often under treating TMJ cases as it is notoriously hard to diagnose and often difficult to fix. Surgery is always a last resort and often the cure is worse than the disease in this case.

Many cases of TMJ pain can be treated by simply taking anti-inflamitory medications like ibuprofen or aspirin or tylenol. Certain herbs like Kava Kava have had an enormous impact on even many severe cases of TMJ, so be sure to try these if nothing else has worked for you yet.

Also, eating a diet of soft foods and staying far away from anything chewy or crunchy will avoid aggravating the problem. As difficult as it may be, a TMJ treatment may require that you not use the muscles of your mouth and jaw as much, therefore try to avoid “over smiling” and stressing the jaws by watching stressful shows and movies. Often people will grind their teeth or tire out the jaw muscles when stressed or excited and this aggravates the jaw joints.

A cold compress followed by a warm compress on the jaw often helps relieve immediate pain and swelling. The cold helps the muscles, and the heat helps the joints by promoting blood flow. By resting your jaw in this way often it will help the joint heal and repair itself, at least temporarily. Also avoiding opening your mouth too wide, and employing some mild stretching, relaxation, and stress reduction techniques will help alleviate mild to moderate symptoms.

You may be given a mouth guard or bite plate/splint to help you reduce the jaw clenching and/or teeth grinding that goes on at night time. These splints should help reduce the muscle tension, but if the pain increases then drop these puppies like they were hot potatoes.

The key to any TMJ treatment is NON INVASIVE procedures first. Try everything you can to relieve the pain and treat the symptoms before you even consider a more invasive treatment like surgery.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 29th, 2009 at 12:29 pm and is filed under Treatment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.