Treatments

 

Temporomandibular Disorders

Treatment of TMD

It is well accepted that conservative non-surgical treatments are effective in the vast majority of patients with TMD’s. The goals of treatment are to decrease pain, to increase jaw function, and to limit the impact of TMD on your daily life.

How do we decide which treatment is best for your TMD?

Treatment generally commences with simple, conservative and safe treatment modalities. The causes, nature and severity of your TMD are taken into account when deciding on your initial treatment plan. For the majority of patients, these initial treatment modalities are sufficient to manage their symptoms. If the initial treatment modalities are not effective in managing your symptoms, then further treatment modalities may be required to help manage you.

Treatment Options

• Medications – Prescription medications and/or “natural” medications can be used to help reduce inflammation, pain, and/or spasm of the jaw joints and jaw muscles
• Self Management techniques which can be performed at home or at work.
• Cognitive Behavioural therapy – understanding what causes and triggers your jaw pain and dysfuction and learning methods to deal with these
• Occlusal Splint Therapy. Splints act like ‘walking sticks’ or ‘crutches’ for your jaw muscles and jaw joints. They support and reduce the loading on these structures in order to facilitate natural healing of the injured structures. Splints are also very important to protect the teeth from the damage that can be caused by tooth clenching and grinding.
• Jaw joint injections with local anaesthetic, hyaluronic acid and/or cortisone.
• Botox injections into the jaw muscles.
• Trigger point injections into the jaw muscles with or without local anaesthesia.