You feel the pain coming on; your muscles tighten; you clench more due to the anxiety of the oncoming pain. You worry that it might be one of your bad episodes. This worry triggers more intense muscle spasms and increases the frequency and intensity of the headaches, and the tightness and pain in the neck. This pain, in turn, triggers more stress and anxiety, feeding the pain anxiety cycle and increasing its momentum. It feeds on itself indefinitely. Unless we change the skeletal relationship of the upper and lower teeth permanently, the trigeminal nerve will continue to be over-stimulated, triggering symptoms in one or all structures it supplies.
After treating this pain cycle successfully for over 30 years, I feel dentistry holds the cure or long-term solution to the following symptoms: recurring headaches, neck pain, eye, ear, facial pain, vertigo, and other symptoms listed on this site.
When you understand the pain anxiety cycle, you will understand what feeds this incessant, ongoing pain and why there is a cure that can permanently interrupt this cycle. This is an entirely new field of medicine called Skeletal Structural Preventive Medicine. The mouth is the only area in the body in which the skeleton protrudes through the skin (gums). The teeth in every human skeleton are rigid vertical support beams with numerous sloping cusps or incline planes that must position properly like the teeth in the gears of two meshing gear wheels or like pieces of a 3D puzzle. If they don’t fit together precisely, the bones of the skeleton, the lower jaw (the mandible), the base of the cranium, both joints and their cartilaginous discs, will be forced to function in a position that is strained. This strains the trigeminal nerve on several fronts. It changes the comfortable working length of the muscles of mastication; the teeth that don’t align properly will receive excessive amounts of stress every time they collide. This misalignment hyper-stimulates the trigeminal nerve every time the teeth come together while chewing, swallowing, clenching, grinding, or bruxing during sleep.
The Pain Anxiety Cycle begins with over-stimulation of the trigeminal nerve that can be caused by premature deflective contacts between upper and lower teeth that don’t align properly. This over-stimulates both the maxillary and mandibular branches of the trigeminal nerve It can also be over-stimulated by a dislocation or strained displacement within the joints caused by the poor meshing or trauma.
In any other area of the body that is repeatedly traumatized such as a dislocated disc in the back or cartilage in the knee, no one questions repeated pain. Yet the jaw is rarely even looked at seriously, even after a severe accident.
This repeated triggering of the trigeminal nerve causes referred headache pain. The pain stems from the branches that lead to the meninges or the spasms it causes in the temporalis and other muscles of mastication, or a combination of both. This leads to increased stress which leads to more clenching and grinding, and the pain anxiety cycle continues to feed on itself, UNLESS dentists learn to understand and permanently eliminate the forces traumatizing the largest cranial nerve, the trigeminal.
Does this mean every person who has a crowded bite has headaches or chronic pain? No, but it does mean that if they do have headaches, it should be the first place doctors look. It is very easy to examine, and we don’t need to keep wasting millions of dollars per year on Cat scans and MRI’s that rarely find the cause of headaches or vertigo. In addition, this procedure is covered by insurance. For the cost of 2 of these tests, the patient can complete phase I, and the pain will disappear.
Some patients’ bites may seem perfectly aligned, but they may have suffered an accident that traumatized the system years earlier. For example, one young woman couldn’t initially recall an accident, but then remembered that as a child she slipped on the upper wrung of a high slide at the park and slid down the stairs, hitting her chin on each stair on the way down. In another case, a 74 year old woman fell on her face when she was 7 and suffered with constant headaches for 67 years. When we successfully eliminated her granddaughter’s migraines, she became aware of this solution. Prior to this, their family, like everyone else, thought the granddaughter’s migraines were hereditary, and she also would suffer through life like her grandmother. Class II malocclusions, deep overbites, cross-bites, etc. are all hereditary, and they are the genetic link that has caused generations of chronic headaches and migraines. Look at pictures of your grandparents, parents, uncles, aunts and siblings, and you’ll see what I mean.
(See detailed information tab to see why precise dentistry has the cure.)
