Acupuncture for Temporomandibular Joint Pain
I was pleased to see that a group of researchers from Manchester in England (that’s its skyline, above!) did a double-bind randomized controlled study of twenty seven people suffering from temporomandibular joint myofascial pain (TMJ/MP), to see if acupuncture would help them.
The people in the trial either had acupuncture or something called “sham” acupuncture, using a device that was created to create a “placebo control.” The piece of equipment is called the Park Sham Device, and there has been a lot of discussion about whether it is really feasible to do “pretend” acupuncture. This study showed that it is.
The acupuncture was shown to have a greater influence on pain and movement than the “sham” treatment.
This is important: TMJ can be very difficult to treat. Last year there was a report, also from the UK, that acupuncture seemed to be effective, based on an audit of dental practices, and this study just adds to the evidence that we are accumulating.
Temporomandibular Joint Dysfunction and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder
Over the last few years I’ve had the privilege of visiting Croatia several times. I was one of the first Western academics to go back there to teach after the war, and I’ve made many good friends. It is a beautiful country with lovely people and it is a terrible shame what happened there.
One of the big problems that remain is the incredible number of people suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). There continues to be some debate about whether PTSD can only occur in response to one major traumatic event in which a person feels that their life is in danger, or whether it can also occur as a result of repeated less serious traumata. We have discussed the relationships between PTSD, resilience and neurological dysfunction, and of the association between PTSD and laterality.
There has also been at least one report of an association between PTSD and atypical facial pain.
A new paper from colleagues in Croatia has clarified this association by showing that people with PTSD are at increased risk of temporomandibular muscle and joint disorder, or TMJD, which used to be known simply as temporomandibular joint (TMJ) dysfunction. This is intuitively obvious, but it is an important finding. The main complaint was of headache, and it is important not to dismiss these headaches as migraine, tension headaches or as some kind of somatization.
There is currently an $8 million project underway to establish valid and reliable TMJD diagnostic criteria. It is to be hoped that the results of the study will advance the field of TMJD research and aid clinicians in their practices. At a meeting of the American Association of Dental Research in Orlando, Florida in March, Richard Ohrbach from the University of Buffalo presented data from the study indicating that 82% of People whose recurrent headaches have been diagnosed as tension-related actually had TMJD.
In April of this year, we had the first meeting of the National Institutes of Health Pain Consortium. There’s a good report in Clinical Psychiatry News about ongoing studies from the University of Washington in Seattle. Niloofar Afari presented data that confirms the findings in the Croatian study. And provides yet more useful information.
The investigators used state records to identify twins and surveyed more than 1,700 female twins by mail and by telephone. The results so far indicate that the association between PTSD and TMJD is real and that there may be a genetic predisposition to the association.
It is important not to miss this possible association. Misdiagnosis can cause a lot of needless suffering.
Temporomandibular Joint Dysfunction
The temporomandibular joint (TMJ) is the hinge joint that connects your mandible or lower jaw to the temporal bone at the side of the skull.
The joint can be affected by many disease processes including osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, the arthritis associated with psoriasis and infectious arthritis. There’s a whole ragbag of other illnesses and injuries that can affect the joint. But it is more commonly affected by muscular tension, problems with the bite, or tooth grinding (bruxism). I’ve been interested in TMJ problems ever since my days working in the Princess Margaret Migraine Clinic in London, where I saw a great many people with chronic headaches due to problems at the joint. A dental colleague helped many of them. Once I had been trained in acupuncture, I found that this is one condition in which I’ve always had good rates of success, both in humans and in horses.
So I was pleased to see an audit of 60 patients with TMJ dysfunction was compiled from the practices of 15 dental practitioners in the United Kingdom who were applying to become members of the thriving British Dental Acupuncture Society. Simple acupuncture was used at local points around the joint, on the neck, and on a point on the hand that is linked up with the joint, and tends to relax muscles and improve blood flow. This was a simple study, and in hindsight, it could have been improved. But the conclusions were encouraging: 85% of patients benefited, and the intensity of the pain was reduced by an average of 75%. This is remarkable since the patients were only receiving acupuncture and not any of the “extras” that I normally recommend as a matter of course.
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