Jaw Pain & Alignment
Is Your Structure Causing Your Jaw Pain?
Over 10 million Americans have jaw pain every year. 1 Some experience it first thing in the morning after waking up, some experience start to come on during a long day at work and others might constantly feel an imbalanced painful nagging in their jaw. Pain is not normal and one thing that many people don't realize is that when the body is unbalanced (in abnormal alignment) it can lead to jaw pain.
Before going any further lets first define the difference between structure and posture.
Posture is an active position we take with our body that we can change by positioning our body in a different way.
Think about slouching over a desk and then catching yourself slouching and remembering to sit-up straight. Structure is the semi-permeant or permanent state of our spine that occurs once our body has compressed due to years of poor posture, improper movement or due to an injury.
We can actively improve our posture but once we put our body in a poor position repeatedly our body starts to think that is the new normal. It then changes the structure of ligaments, tendons, muscles and sometimes even bone to which then leads to abnormal structure (This phenomenon occurs due to a process called deformation/creep. 2, 3, 4).
Abnormal structure can often feel like being unable to sit up straight without discomfort.
After the body has shifted away from normal and is no longer in normal alignment we experience pain and aren't able to move as well.
What does that have to do with the jaw?
A lot.
9 muscles control the jaw, those nine muscles connect to the neck through a system called the cranio-cervico-mandibular system a fancy way to say the neck-head-jaw system. (5)
When the body is injured or we put ourselves in an abnormal posture repeatedly it results in abnormal alignment due to the the body compensating.
Think about when someone rolls an ankle, they put more weight on the opposite leg so the ankle doesn't hurt (compensation). The body does this but on smaller scale and on a scale we don't have to actively think about when we sit or stand in bad posture or have small injuries. Sitting hunched over a desk one time isn't going to cause an issue.
Yet, if we do this repeatedly over months or years the body compensates. It does this by increasing muscular tension to try and keep us upright and over time if the body is no longer is able to compensate, imbalance and abnormal strucutre starts to set in. It's important to note that each of us have a different level where the body can compensate before it starts to become imbalanced and pain starts to occur.
Since the neck and the jaw are connected through the neck-head-jaw system, when the head starts to come forward (anterior head syndrome) it causes muscles in the jaw to pull the jaw backward which puts pressure on the disc of the jaw which leads to pain and discomfort. When this is combined with head tilt (when the center line of the head veers to one side or angles away from the midline of the body) muscles of the jaw become unbalanced and can lead to improper movement of the jaw and clicking and popping of the jaw.
By bringing the body back to normal alignment it allows for the body to return to a normal balanced position and often times leads to a reduction in how often the jaw pain occurs as well as a decrease in intensity of jaw pain.
I hope after reading this you have a more thorough understanding of how jaw pain can come to be and as always if you have any questions feel free free to reach out to me at drcoffman@optimizecolumbus.com