Many people experience relatively mild or periodic symptoms of TMJ that improve on their own within weeks or months if they avoid certain foods, apply ice and/or moist heat to the jaw joint area and are mindful not to open their mouth too wide while eating or engaging in other activities. However, for some individuals these symptoms can be debilitating and affect their quality of life.
TMJ Treatment: Relieving Jaw Pain and Improving Oral Health
Treatment options for TMJ treatment include medications, occlusal adjustment, physical therapy and oral appliances. Medications are often used to decrease pain and inflammation in the muscles around your jaw joints and can be taken orally or topically. Anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) and/or muscle relaxers can be very effective in reducing the tightness of these muscles.
Physiotherapy involves a thorough assessment of your jaw and facial muscles to determine the cause of your TMJ. This includes a detailed verbal history, physical assessment that may involve testing movements of your jaw and feeling for tenderness, and trigger point massage to identify the tight knots of muscles around your jaw.
If other therapies have not provided relief, your dentist might recommend arthrocentesis, which is an injection into the jaw joint to wash out the joint and dislodge a disc that is stuck in the joint. A surgical procedure called a condylotomy is a more extreme option. In this type of open surgery, your surgeon removes the troubled articular disc and replaces it with a graft from another area, such as fat tissue from your abdomen.
