Why We Start With the Neck
Hey guys, I’m Dr. Aaron Wall with Gateway Chiropractic. How do we really start helping you if you’re dealing with jaw pain, or TMJ, or TMJD—temporomandibular dysfunction? I want to kind of go through the process with you.
With all of our patients who have jaw issues, most of the time—like nine out of 10 times—it’s not just the jaw. A lot of the problem is in the neck, and it’s a structural problem. I’ll kind of show you on the spine model what I mean by that.
This is the area where the jaw would be, but you have a lot of muscles attaching to the back of the skull, the masseter muscles right through here, and the SCM muscles in the neck. They’re all attached. Even the temporal muscles above, right through here—all these muscles have a lot to do with the jaw, its movement, and the forces put on it.
What we find with patients who have a lot of jaw issues is that typically the neck and upper body are in a bad way. They’re subluxated; they’re misaligned. How does it happen? It could be from trauma, but usually it’s not. For most people having jaw issues, this is stuff that’s been going on for a long time.
The way they grind their teeth, the way they sleep, the way they work—if they’re at a desk with their head hunched over, looking down. What I see most of the time with people with jaw issues is that the head is not over the shoulders, and the shoulders are not back where they should be.
Most people who have a lot of TMJ or jaw issues on both sides or one side have their head in front of the body and their shoulders rolled in. This is straining all these muscles here. Over time, the neck starts to lose its natural curve, and everything gets locked up. Those imbalances then lead to the jaw.
There could be a lot of different things with the jaw. It doesn’t open properly. It hurts to close. It hurts to chew. If you’re grinding, one side closes and the other side does not. So I want to walk you through how we actually take care of that. Marquis is going to help us demonstrate.
Checking and Working on the Jaw Muscles
The first thing we would do with somebody who has TMJ issues is have her open her mouth. We would actually feel for imbalances in how her jaw opens. This right side clicks. It kind of protrudes out as she opens the jaw, so this side is struggling to kind of keep it open.
What we’re going to do is massage the masseter muscle. It’s a real strong, powerful jaw muscle here, and there are a couple of bellies of it. This is really the big area of it, but then we’ll kind of go down in here. This is another one, and that’s really tight. You can kind of feel that just like a guitar string right there, so we’re going to massage that.
These can be a little sensitive as we do it, but it kind of hurts in a good way, if that makes sense. So we’re working on that.
We’re also going to have her close her jaw, and we’re going to really work on these temporal muscles. They’re a little bitty, but they have a big impact on the jaw. We’re going to have her open all the way, and we’re stretching that out. We’ll close it. We’ll open all the way, stretch it, and close. We’ll do one more: open, stretch it, and then close. Perfect.
Stretching Under the Skull
Another area is under the skull. They’re called suboccipital muscles. These muscles get so tight when there are jaw issues and neck misalignments, so we’re just going to stretch them out. This one feels pretty good as we do it, but it’s so tight on people.
A lot of the time, you get headaches with the jaw pain as well. If that’s you, I would bet these muscles are very tight. So we’re stretching them out as well. There we go.
Adjusting the Jaw, Neck, and Shoulders
Then we’ll have you open your jaw. We’re going to actually adjust it here. Sometimes we have a patient seated; sometimes we have her lying down. We use an activator instrument, so it’s real easy on the jaw. No manual manipulation needed. We’ll just go in here and hit a couple of areas of the jaw. Very nice.
And then we’ll open. Okay, it’s tracking better. We’ll close the jaw here.
The other thing we’re going to do is adjust her neck. With her, we have subluxation of the base, and right up here under the skull on her left side. We’re going to adjust both of these. So, really easy. Good. That’s one. And then we’ll get this one here. There we go. Very nice. Very nice. It takes a lot of the tension out.
Another thing we’re going to do is the shoulders. We’re going to help push these shoulders back into alignment. We have a little drop piece that we use to do this real easy, and this one feels really good just to get that pressure off your shoulders. Awesome job. Awesome job.
So, very simple—that’s how we work on the jaw. But again, we also want to realign the spine, realign the neck, and get the head back over the shoulders. We do a lot of adjustments and rehab to accomplish that. When you do that, you’re getting to the root cause. You can really help the jaw and get that pain to where it’s not affecting your daily life.
Dr. Aaron Wall with Gateway Chiropractic. Check out our other TMJ videos on our website, drwalldc.com.
