You see this every day. It’s a very, very common issue. You’re not the only one that’s having the problem.
I, myself, am a heavy clincher. It’s where I hold my tension and there’s a lot of ways that we can treat this. We have numerous techniques from using a TENS unit, which is, you know, it pulses the muscle to try to relax it.
Treatment that freezes the muscle so we can get in there and massage out any, you know, connective tissue, you know, that’s an option. But what we see that works the best and what works long term is a bite guard. We also use Botox a lot.
Botox, sometimes these muscles in our jaw, they get overworked. We use them every day. We chew every day.
We clench our teeth at night. We grind our teeth. We just ask a whole lot of this muscle.
So it gets overworked. It gets hypertrophic. And sometimes we have to remind it it needs to calm down a little bit.
So we’ll use Botox to take some of those muscle fibers and calm them down. Botox doesn’t take the muscle out of control. You’re not, you know, talking about not being able to chew.
You really won’t even notice a difference in your chewing. But this really helps solve some of the pain. And we use all these treatments in conjunction with each other.
It just depends on the patient, exactly what they need, how severe it is. We use all four of those to get somebody feeling better.
