All the muscles in your body are connected. If one gets tense, all the muscles around it become tense too. For example, you've probably felt your shoulders and neck get stiffer when your TMJ grows worse. But there are other muscles in the body that are not as obvious. You may not have noticed all the small muscles in your head that can be affected. Your throat muscles, eye muscles, tongue,and forehead muscles. There are muscles all over the place and these muscles all get stiff too.
As this tension builds up little by little, you'll begin to feel the secondary symptoms of TMJ including the following;
Voice fluctuations
Difficulty swallowing
Bloodshot eyes
Tongue pain
Balance problems, "vertigo", dizziness, or disequilibrium
The feeling of a foreign object in the throat
Clogged, stuffy, "itchy" ears, feeling of fullness
Dentists are amazed at the number of people who have a significant TMJ problem, which has not been diagnosed. Often their symptoms are serious, but the dentists and medical doctors they have seen were unable to make a diagnosis. The patient knows something is wrong and may have accepted the notion that they will just have to live with the symptoms. Another very perplexing thing is that often the TMJ condition has been correctly diagnosed, but the treatment rendered has not resolved the problem. Or, sometimes a therapy has provided a temporary relief of symptoms, but other times the patient is being drugged into oblivion. These situations are especially sad, because the patients have often spent a lot of money, still agonize with the symptoms, and have nowhere to turn for relief.
The purpose of this writing is to allow you to do a "self-diagnosis" of TMJ dysfunction. The symptoms associated with TMJ dysfunction vary greatly, and almost all the symptoms could, in fact, be a symptom of some other medical problem. This is a major reason why getting a correct diagnosis can be difficult. If you experience as many as 5 of the following symptoms, it is almost certain that you have a TMJ dysfunction, at least to some degree.
Frequent headaches
Grating, clicking or popping in jaw joint
Ringing, roaring or buzzing in your ear
Fatigue in jaw after chewing tough food
Jaw gets stuck (either open or closed)
Sides of tongue imprinted by teeth
Difficulty in opening your jaw widely
Fatigue easily or chronically fatigued
Clinching or grinding the teeth
Suffered a blow to chin, face or head
Jaw deviates to side when opening wide
Tenderness in muscles of face or jaw
Fracturing of the back teeth
Stiffness or tension in neck muscles
Frequent neckaches at base of skull
Stuffiness or pressure in your ear
Dizziness or vertigo
Pain in area of jaw joint
Awaken with a headache
Fingers on hand tingle or go numb
Missing teeth (except wisdom teeth)
Had orthodontic extractions
History of a whiplash injury
Chewing gum worsens symptoms
Chronic low back pain
Sensitivity of the teeth
Excessive wear of the teeth
Radiating pain from neck to shoulder
An additional telltale clue that may signal a TMJ problem is a facial asymmetry. Look in the mirror and draw an imaginary line down the middle of your face between your eyes, down your nose, between your front teeth, and through the middle of your chin. Do you notice that your nose is crooked? Is the center point of your chin off the midline? If your nose is crooked and hasn't been broken, it may be significant. Likewise, if the center point of your chin is deviated to one side of the midline, it may also be significant.
For gnathologic function to be optimal there should be an orthogonal relationship (a parallelism) between the bones of the skull. Facial asymmetries, like those described above, often indicate a lack of such parallelism and may be associated with temporomandibular joint dysfunction.
