TMJ/ Jaw Treatment

Young woman with blonde hair experiencing pain or discomfort, holding her jaw and with eyes closed.

Body In Mind Physio offers specialised services for TMJ dysfunction. Patients experiencing facial pain, teeth grinding, jaw pain, headaches, clicking, lock jaw, or limited jaw movement are encouraged to seek our care. We look at the root cause of the problem rather than treating just the symptoms.

Your experience within the first session should include:

  1. A comprehensive subjective history, in other words, a good chat about your history with this issue. When it started, what makes it worse, what relieves it, what does the problem stop or limit you from doing, who you have seen in the past and what effect it had, etc.

  2. An assessment of your neck and jaw range of motion, strength and function. The reason we also check your neck is because drivers of jaw pain and dysfunction could come from stiff levels in your neck that you may not even be aware of.

  3. Treatment - a combination of manual therapy (hands on treatment) and exercise prescription to dial into the the assessed root causes of the issue

  4. Constant rechecking of baselines - when treating, we will constantly go back to some movements or your pain and see if the treatment option just provided has changed anything. If we get change from a treatment option, we are beginning to form a picture of which potential areas are driving the pain and dysfunction.

  5. Home exercises to go home with - we will send you home with 1-2 exercises that relates to moving, treating, strengthening an area that we found success in changing your pain/symptoms. If we can relate that exercise to symptoms changes, it can be a powerful tool to use in between your treatment sessions to have more control over the pain/symptoms.

Following your first treatment session, each subsequent session should be aiming to change your baselines so that you have less frequent, less intense pain, increased movement and increased strength. If we have correctly identified the cause of your symptoms, continued treatment in that area should yield further positive results. If baselines are not improving in a timely manner (generally 2-3 sessions) then we will look to move you into a better pathway, whether that be back to your GP or a referral onto one of our Oral Maxillofacial Surgeon connections.