It’s Monday morning and Mary sits in her doctor’s office, clutching her head in her hands. The doctor greets her and asks her how she is. Mary starts crying, and between sobs gives him the details of another bad weekend.
Mary couldn’t go to her son’s soccer practice and had to miss her daughter’s ballet recital. She was in bed with her worst migraine in months. Yes, she took the Imitrex that is perpetually prescribed for her, but it barely had any effect at all on the intense pain. Finally, she simply turned the lights off, curled up in bed and slept the whole weekend away.
Obviously, Mary is frustrated and fed up with her chronic headaches and migraines. The pain is getting in the way of her life and affecting her family relationships. It is defining her.
Mary’s symptoms are head pain, neck pain, back pain and shoulder pain. Nothing new there. But the real question is this one: what is the cause of her pain?
Simply put, Mary’s pain is a sign of disease. Those headaches and migraines are a reflection of a medical condition. Until the disease is treated, Mary will continue being a slave to her pain.
What is the underlying disease? It is called malocclusion. Mary has an improper bite. Her teeth and muscles are not working in harmony, and her body is lashing out in response.
When your teeth don’t fit together properly, the muscles responsible for bringing the teeth together have to work overtime. You chew and swallow about 1,500 times a day. With malocclusion, that is 1,500 times your muscles are under unnecessary stress.
In order to treat the symptoms, we actually need to treat the disease. If a doctor or dentist prescribes painkillers to treat the jaw and head pain, that’s a symptoms-only approach. Mary deserves better than that, and if you share her type of pain, so do you.
Even a visit to a physiotherapist is not the complete answer. You may be relieving the pain without medication. But the pain will usually return if malocclusion is your problem. The only way to be sure the pain is not coming back is to treat the disease. You need to treat the malocclusion.
Physicians sincerely do want to help their patients. If all they can do is write another prescription, they grow frustrated, too. Perhaps your doctor doesn’t have the right tool.
Because there is one. Now you can ask about it – neuromuscular dentistry.
Your physiotherapist or chiropractor can relax the muscles and realign the upper spine. Your doctor can prescribe pain killers to mask the pain and allow you to get on with your day – most of the time.
However, only a neuromuscular dentist can treat the disease, the malocclusion, to maintain the good work of other professionals and make the pain killers unnecessary over time.
Studies suggest 75 per cent of the population suffer from headaches. According to Statistics Canada, seven million working days are lost each year due to headache-related pain. If we assume there are 200 working days each year, over 25,000 people are not working all year, every year, because of headaches. And the reason they are not working is, in large part, treatable.
Many people think that stress is the cause of clenching and grinding. However, recent research studies are leading us to understand that clenching and grinding are caused by malocclusion. They are the body’s responses to the discomfort.
I recently had a patient confirm this. After beginning neuromuscular therapy, she told me, the stress level in her life increased – but the clenching and grinding did not return.
Let’s go back to Mary, three months into the future.
Mary is again in her doctor’s office. This time she is smiling. Her eyes sparkle and in her hands is a soccer trophy her son won last weekend. On her phone are the photographs of her daughter’s ballet recital.
In her mouth a small plastic shield rests over her teeth. Mary is wearing a neuromuscular orthotic, which is training her teeth and muscles to cooperate and work together.
Mary is well on the path to beating the disease that has limited her life. She is finding new hope for the future. And those slept-through weekends are fading into her past.
Dr. Sholina Kherani is a neuromuscular dentist practising in Edmonton, and also an instructor and mentor for other neuromuscular dentists in North America and beyond. Reach her with your questions and comments at drsholinakherani@shaw.ca.
