Jaw Pain and Chiropractic

Hi Dr. Ryan Hetland here. Welcome to today's 3-minute chiropractic seminar.

I want to talk to you today about a really fascinating topic that's one of my favorites, actually, outside of, you know, neck and back spine issues as a chiropractor and that's jaw pain.

Jaw pain is a very common issue that I fix in my office and I'm sure all chiropractors around the country and the world do as well, but the jaw is something that I've kind of specialized in and I'd like to explain it to you today because not everyone really even knows that chiropractors can even help jaw issues.

And so, a jaw pain affects probably 20 to 30% based on a research I read of 20 to 30% of adults and it's not just a little pain in the jaw. This could be debilitating pain. Even the muscle gets atrophied if there's so much nerve pressure. You can't chew, you can't talk without significant pain in the jaw and it's a major deal, just as major as back or neck pain.

I love fixing it. I had a case today that I wanted to show you, but I just couldn't take 3 minutes to break away, but I wanted to show you. And here's the thing, jaw issues can create headaches, which is super common that the headaches are coming from the jaw.

Jaw issues can create ear pain and people sometimes even think they have ear infections because the pain is so bad and it's just radiating into it. And the jaw can create neck pain and vice versa, the neck can create ear pain, headaches and jaw pain.

There's a super common condition called forward head posture that's kind of setting this up. I'll show you. I have a poster in my office here, forward head posture here, where you can see where the neck goes forward and you can see these dots, where here's the jaw and here's the upper neck. You can see how close they are.

And when it comes to jaw stuff, it's almost 100% that there is a neck issue as well with it, so something to consider if you have jaw pain is going to a chiropractor, calling one up if you're not in my area or call another one up and see are they confident and do they fix a lot of jaw issues--temporomandibular joint dysfunction.

And I"ll kind of show you the joint as I close here. This is a picture of the joint itself, and that right there is what acts like a disc in the spine and acts like a disc for your TMJ. So, I thought it would be helpful. I have a link below here to ChiroTrust and they did a great job writing an article on it. Check it out. And I'll see you back here tomorrow.

Have a great day.