I’d like to talk to you a little bit today about TMJ, temporal mandibular joint, more specifically temporal mandibular joint dysfunction, or syndrome. Basically, it’s just excruciating jaw pain. Sometimes the jaw will actually get a little bit locked. It can be locked, where it doesn’t open all the way. I’ve even seen it where it won’t close all the way. And it drives you crazy. Actually, I had the same problem when I was younger. Mine would pop constantly every time I would chew. Everybody at the table would be looking at me because I’d go pop, pop, pop. And then, I would have just like somebody stabbed me in the face sometimes. The severe, severe pain within the joint.

The thing that drove me absolutely crazy is I’d go through these stages where I couldn’t open it all the way. I’d be like … trying to get the stupid thing to open. Well, I actually went to an upper cervical chiropractor and after he started to adjust me, within a few weeks I started to realize that my jaw didn’t pop anymore. As time went on, I realized that it never got hung up anymore. After that, it pretty much disappeared. I no longer had the pain anymore. That upper cervical doctor, I went to him, because I certainly didn’t go to him for my TMJ problem, I actually went to him for a lot of other things, sleep and energy and stuff like that, that totally changed. Anyway, I started asking him could this thing in my neck have anything to do with my jaw? He started to explain to me that yeah, this jaw is a free hanging bone.

This bone, basically you could take the jawbone off of your face. It’s only connected right here with these ligaments that connect to the jaw joint. It’s like a ball and socket joint on both sides. Both sides, it has these balls that fit up inside this little socket. That allows it to pivot and move so you can open, close, move your jaw. What happens is the ligaments that support this area, they hold the ball up into the socket and allow it to move in a normal fashion.

But, if the nerves that go to the ligaments aren’t a 100%, if somehow those nerve messages that keep those ligaments tight get interfered with, then the ligaments start to get a little lax. When that happens, the ball starts to shift inside the joint because the ligaments aren’t holding it tightly, so it’ll start to shift.

As it shifts, now it starts to wear abnormally. It gets out of the socket, and it can, for one, get hung up like mine used to do, where it won’t open all the way because the ball’s not in the socket anymore. And it can actually start to shift from side to side. It can tire out the muscles that are supposed to hold the jaw together and cause you to chew. If it gets a little shifted, drops on one side, now it kind of works abnormally and can start to fatigue, can start to get sore, painful, inflamed.

It can hit the nerves that come down through the jaw. Why would those ligaments get loose or lax? The nerves that supply this joint come directly out of the upper part of the neck and straight to that joint. Come off the brain stem, which are down in the top two bones of the neck. If one of the bones in the upper part of the neck is just a little bit misaligned, maybe you don’t have any neck pain because there’s no pain perception there, so you wouldn’t feel the actual bone out of line putting pressure, but it could still interfere with those nerves that go to that jaw joint, which could cause one side or both sides to get lax.

It could cause the jaw to shift, to work abnormally in the joint so that it wears out the joint, so that it could wear out the little disc that’s between there, so that it could get stuck. It could create all the symptoms that often are associated with temporal mandibular joint dysfunction. When I started getting this upper part corrected, what happened was it took the pressure off of the nerves that went to the joint or that controlled those ligaments.

When the pressure came off the nerves, the ligaments started to draw back up, started to tighten back up again and pull that bone back into that joint, so now I had normal temporal mandibular joint function. My jaw opened like it’s supposed to. Everything in that area was tight again, like it’s supposed to be. That’s how a misalignment in the upper neck can create temporal mandibular joint problems, and that’s also how, if the bone gets out of align, and we can correct it, temporal mandibular joint syndrome problems can actually heal. They can actually get better.

We all know that taking medications might mask the problem temporarily, but it’s not going to fix anything because you don’t have a drug deficiency that causes this. There’s something going on in your body. We need to figure out what that is, correct what’s going on in your body, rather than trying to mask it from something outside in so that your body can actually heal naturally.

No side effects, just getting your body back on track the way it’s designed to with those bolt jaw joints in there, nice, firm, tight, so you got that nice smooth jaw movement. If you have temporal mandibular joint problems, TMJ, or you have a family member that does, let’s find them an upper cervical doctor to help balance this back out to get this joint healthy again so it works the way it was designed to work, and get rid of the pain that goes along with it. Google upper cervical chiropractor in your area. Try to find a doctor closest to you.