1. 1.Do your muscles ache or feel fatigued after eating or having dental work done?
   

2. 2.Do you wake up frequently in the morning with headaches, sore facial muscles, stiff neck and or sensitive teeth? 
   

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3. 3.Here are some examples of crooked or crowded teeth that caused a LIFETIME (not a couple of days) of daily pain for these patients.  This is because your skeleton ( your teeth) can’t be ground down or realigned by you grinding your teeth, this is what causes the pain, it needs to be professionally adjusted.  (Click here to see an example)                                                                        
   

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4. 4.Are your back molars worn flat or broken down with large fillings?
   

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5. 5.Do you clench or grind your teeth while you are asleep, frustrated or under stress? This generates the headaches and neck pain while you sleep, and prevents you from reaching the deeper levels of sleep resulting in chronic fatigue and depression from the pain as well.

   

   
   

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6. 6.Are your eye teeth (cuspids or canines) worn off on the tip? They should come to a point and should not be flat across.
   

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7. 7.Do you have a deep overbite? These patients along

   

   with class II malocclusions cause the majority of chronic pain situations. To diagnose whether you have a deep overbite measure how far the biting edge of your upper comes down over the front of your lower front teeth

   

   with a millimeter ruler. If this measurement is 2 ½ - 10mm, you have a deep overbite and your back teeth did not erupt to the height they should have which causes over compression within your jaw joints, and muscles spasms and grinding of the teeth to go with it. This is what a deep overbite looks like: Notice that half or more of the lower front teeth are covered by the upper front teeth. This patient has crooked lower front teeth as well. This is often the case, and ruins many lives with daily pain.
   

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8. 8. Do your teeth ache or are they sensitive to hot, cold, or pressure?
   

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9. 9. Your upper front teeth should not be worn or chipped across the front. If they are it means your jaw is coming forward and you are grinding them down during your sleep.
   

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10. 10. Have you been in an accident or received other trauma to the jaw in athletics ect?
    

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11. 11. Do your jaws feel tight or difficult to open?
    

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12. 12. Do you ever hear clicking or popping when you open and close your jaw? Or did you ever experience clicking or grating sound when you yawn? Open and close and move your jaw side to side to see if you can hear clicking, popping or grating (gravel like sound) in the jaw joint in front of your ear? This would indicate you have a dislocation in the one or both of your jaw joints which lie within 2-3mm of your brain. If you have a slipped disc in your back no one questions that you have muscle spasms and pain, why should it be any different in your head?
    

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13. 13. Limited opening usually indicates a dislocation of the jaw, or severe muscle tightness. You should be able to open 45-55mm when measured from the top edge of your lower front teeth to the biting edge of the upper front teeth.  You should be able to move your lower jaw 10-13 mm right and left without clicking, popping, or grading in the joints.
    

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14. 14. Have you been told that you might have TMJ by your dentist or hygienist?
    

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15. 15. Do you have an open bite which means, your front teeth don’t come together when you close? This can make it difficult to bite off sandwiches, bread ect.   These front teeth are critical to the guidance systems in the mouth.
    

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16. 16. Do you have any missing teeth? One missing tooth

    

    will cause the remaining teeth in the area to shift, rotate, and tilt to fill the space and connect the arch again. The arch is one of engineering’s strongest structures as long as all the bricks are in place. Remove one and the arch easily collapses.  The same is true with the arch of teeth. 

    

    Notice how after one tooth is extracted both upper and lower arches of teeth are affected if the tooth is not replaced with a bridge after the extraction. The arch on the right shows how the missing tooth allows the upper tooth to grow down into the space.  The teeth behind rotate and tilt forward, and the tooth in front of the missing tooth rotate and drift backward into the space. Note in the ideal class I occlusion (bite) the teeth of the opposing arches align with the pointed areas of the lower arch interdigitating between the pointed areas of the upper arch much like the gears of a clock.  How well does this clock work if you extract or tilt, or rotate a couple of the teeth in the gears of the clock? I’d like you to keep this image of the ideal meshing of the two arches of teeth in your mind throughout this self-examination explanation.                                 
    

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17. 17. Class II malocclusions are very often accompanied by a small retruded chin and a forward head posture which changes the skeletal structural mechanics down the entire body due to the fact that the head weights as much as a bowling ball (13-16lbs). This is what triggers the neck pain, shoulder pain, and lower back pain. I believe it is the kick

    

    off or initiator of the sequence of events leading to the chronic pain of fibromyalgia. Fibromyalgia lecturers claim that as many as 80% of fibromyalgia patients also have a history of TMJ problems. Here is what a class II looks like:  In a class II malocclusion the pointed cusp tips of the lower and upper do not align between the cusp tips of the opposing arch, they align point to point. Try to imagine how well the gears of the clock shown earlier, or the gears of your transmission would run if the teeth lined up point to point.
    

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18. 18. A cross-bite is a very common cause of pain. With a cross bite all, one, or two of your lower teeth cross over to a position where the outside cusp aligns outside the outside cusp tip of the upper back teeth?                                                                 
    

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19. 19. Place you

    

    fingers above your temple and clench your teeth hard and you will feel these huge muscles contract. When they go into spasm along

    

    with several other muscles due to your dislocation it is like putting your head in a vice, and this is one of the areas you experience your headache pain. When these large muscles like the sternocleidomastoid muscle (the purple diagonal muscle that attaches to the skull just behind the ear, and to the top of the sternum at the top of the rib cage) go into spasm due to the dislocation or the TMJoints of the jaw they will cock the entire head forward or laterally toward one side or the other. Because the head weighs as much as a 13-16lbs bowling ball it will change the structural mechanics down the entire body leading to neck pain, back pain, fibromyalgia, and more.  Many of your headaches will travel up from the back of your neck to your head making your muscles work overtime to support the forward and lateral head posture.
    

If you suffer from any of these chronic symptoms and no one is giving you any possible causes, but more and more drugs to take, please contact Dr. Richard T. Seymour.