TMJ 'dysfunction' - Health implications

I saw the same published on my thread on ThisisMS.

It looks to me a lot like a bite alignment appliance - kind of half what Dr Amir does.

This is the issue with this type of treatment, there seems to be a lot of people willing to align your over or under bite, worldwide, but not quite sure of exactly what or where they are aligning it with.

It's frustrating as Dr Amir's work is pigeonholed along with all the people who don't seem to be completely sure of what they are doing.

What is good about all this enquiry is that it is being increasingly accepted that the TMJ and other asymmetries play a vital roll in patient health and is behind some 85% of illnesses - many wrongly attributed to auto immune dysfunction or classed into various syndromes and idiopathies!

It should be mandatory that all GP's, physicians, neurologists and other specialists refer patients for a cranio-dental and skeletal symmetry evaluation in their differential diagnoses, to avoid a claim of negligence. This includes patients who repeatedly present with a cold, children who present with asthma, headaches, females presenting with gynaecological problems, patients presenting with fatigue, IBS, IBD, heart palpitations, neck pain, back pain and countless other symptoms.

The conglomeration and lack of timely treatment of these symptoms in later life leads to a diagnosis of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Multiple Sclerosis and other idiosyncrasies.

I first heard of TMJ dysfunction on ThisIsMS in 2006, and at that time on that forum and on Cpnhelp.org it transpired that many people with the MS diagnosis actually had problems with their jaw, which at times made it difficult to eat and caused quite a lot of pain. At that time It did not occur to me that this might be a cause of MS. Later in 2010 at the CCSVI conference in Glasgow, David Williams of the USA (http://www.davidwilliamsorthodontics.com/) was given an unscheduled slot at the end of the day so he could tell us that he had recently been treating 10 MS patients and all 10 of them had jaw misalignments and all 10 of them had recovered some of their function after treatment. Again it did not cross my mind that this could be a cause, I rather thought it might be a result of muscle problems, and I thought of it as just one of those things that pwMS might be prone to, much like many pwMS suffer from hypothyroiditis.

However in the past two years since the conference more information has come my way... for example, many people with MS had been diagnosed after a fall or an accident in which their neck and head was injured. All these indicators start adding up and the clincher for me was when the physiotherapist at EHC demonstrated to Ella and I the effect of lining up her jaw had on the strength of her legs.

It just takes so long for all these indicators to come to the forefront of research. We have the same problems with TMJ as we have with CCSVI, no one wants to hear what we have to say because they all have too much to lose, as is clearly demonstrated in the Confessions of a pharmaceutical executive video... http://www.themsforum.org/viewtopic.php?f=95&t=141