MIT Genius Invents Treatment For TMJ

For Men And Women Who Would Like To Cure TMJ Problems Faster And Better Than A Dentist, And For Much Less Money, This May Be The Solution For You.

By Susan Davis

If I had known what I know now about the causes of TMJ, and the financial motives of "TMJ Specialists" I would have saved myself over $5,000, and two years of pain and frustration. I hope that by telling you my story, I can save you years of pain and discomfort, and thousands of dollars. The heroes of my story turned out to be some brilliant people who have nothing to do with dentistry, but that comes later in the story.

For me, TMJ started three years ago with physical and emotional stress

My problems with TMJ started three years ago at a time when I had a lot of stress in my life. Some of it was physical stress, because I had been in an auto accident. Some of it was emotional stress, because I was going through a divorce. And some of it was financial stress (also from the divorce). Each day, life just seemed to be about getting through the day. And when the whole point is just to get through each day, it's easy to lose track of exactly what part of your body hurts or aches.

But even when life is just about getting through the day, when aches and pains get bad enough, they eventually get your attention. Over time I noticed my neck hurting more and more in the morning. Then I started getting headaches regularly. Then I felt like I had an ear infection, but when I went to the doctor, she checked my ear and said everything looked OK.

A couple of days later, I felt like I had a sinus infection, and with that problem and the ear problem, I got a referral to an ENT doctor. The ENT doctor was so booked up that it took two months to get in to see him. Two months of pain in my sinuses and ear. When I finally got in to see the ENT, he examined me and told me that my ear and sinuses were fine. He suggested that the problem might be TMJ, and I should see a dentist. A dentist? For my sinuses and my ear? Really?

​I was doubtful, so I went home and Googled TMJ along with the symptoms I was having. Bingo! The symptoms I had were all listed as possible TMJ symptoms, so I made an appointment to see my dentist the very next day. "Thank god my dentist doesn't take two months to see like the ENT" I thought to myself.

My dentist looked at my teeth and said "it doesn't look like you grind much". My heart sank. A lot of the websites had mentioned teeth grinding as part of TMJ. Was this going to be another dead end?

Then my dentist started pressing her fingertips into my jaw muscles, and she pressed a spot that hurt so much I almost jumped out of the chair. She told me I probably did have TMJ disorder. She said she could make me a mouth guard, but that it probably would not help because I was not grinding my teeth. She referred me to a TMJ specialist.

I made an appointment with the specialist for an evaluation. I had to pay $375 for that half-hour evaluation. It wasn't covered by insurance the way the doctor visit to my primary care doctor and the ENT were covered.

The office of the TMJ specialist was pretty plush, so I had a feeling that the $375 was only the beginning. Boy did that ever turn out to be right. The TMJ specialist examined me and he confirmed that my problem was TMJ disorder. He used a lot of fancy words like "condile" and "mandibular fosa" and "trigeminal nerve, and he told me that "TMJ" stands for "Tempormandibular Joint". (I don't know why they can't just speak English and say "jaw joint".)

He said the pain in my sinus and ear came partly from the jaw joint causing problems with the nerve that runs right next to the joint, and when the joint gets inflamed or is positioned wrong the nerves get disturbed. He also explained that the spot in my jaw muscle that hurt so much when my dentist poked it is called a "trigger point". He said the trigger points come from muscle spasms during nighttime clenching, and that trigger points can cause you to feel pain in other places where nothing is actually wrong.

I was relieved to have found someone who seemed to be able to explain what was going on. He assured me that his practice was the right place to get my TMJ treated, and that treatment takes a while and goes through stages. He said I had to sign up for the whole process and it would cost me $5000, which I could pay in installments. Five thousand dollars?! Are you serious? I went home in pain and depressed, and started reading more on the internet, and ordered a couple of books on TMJ.

I also looked up the muscle "trigger points" the TMJ specialist talked about and found out there are massage therapists who specialize in getting rid of trigger points. I decided it would be a lot less expensive to try having the trigger points "released" by a massage therapist before spending $5000 on a TMJ specialist.

I saw the trigger point massage therapist a few times and each massage decreased the pain in my ear and sinus. It also seemed to make my neck hurt less in the morning when I would wake up. But the relief from each massage only lasted a couple of days, and then I would have to go back and get the trigger points released again. Apparently I was clenching my teeth in my sleep, and that kept adding to the trigger points every night.

One of my friends told me she had heard about a chiropractor who specialized in TMJ, so I went to see him also. He did some physical manipulations of my jaw and my neck and my back. Just like with the trigger point massage therapist, the treatments seemed to reduce my pain some, though not as much as the trigger point massage, and only for a short while.

Between seeing my dentist, and the evaluation by the TMJ specialist, and the massage treatments and the chiropractic treatments, I had spent about $1000, and it didn't seem like I was getting better. I had also spent thousands of dollars on my divorce lawyer, but at least on that front I felt like I was moving toward a solution. I was really scared about using up my savings.

The adventure with the "TMJ specialist" begins…

Lying in bed in pain one morning, I decided that if I couldn't get out of pain, I couldn't enjoy my life, so I might as well go ahead and pay the big bucks to the TMJ specialist.

​So I paid the first installment and started down another TMJ treatment road. The specialist gave me some daily posture exercises to do and made me a thing I had to wear in my mouth at night called a "flat plane splint". It was supposed to keep me from clenching my teeth as hard at night. I hated it, but I dutifully wore it every night.

The posture and jaw exercises the TMJ guru gave me to do were the same ones that were in two of the TMJ books I had bought, so I was already doing those exercises. Then there were all the gizmos at the TMJ specialist...

One gizmo was an electronic bite-measuring device that somehow measured how my teeth came together when I would bite. Another gizmo used sensors stuck to my face to measure electronic signals my jaw muscles gave off. Those gizmos were supposed to show how well I was doing. After a while I became suspicious that they were more for show, or at least that they didn't really show how I was doing -- more on that later.

Then there was another electronic gizmo where they stuck pads with wires to my face. It was designed to stimulate the nerves and muscles. I asked if that was supposed to do the same thing as the trigger point massage I had been receiving, and I was told "it's much more complicated than that -- more advanced". But I'm not so sure about that, because each time I had gone for a trigger point massage, I felt better afterward, but I didn't feel much better after being hooked to the electronic gizmo, so I decided to keep seeing the massage therapist, though less often, to save money.

A few weeks went by, and instead of things getting better, I started having a NEW problem. My jaw started clicking on the right side sometimes when I opened and closed my mouth. I had read about that as a TMJ symptom in the books I read, and on some of the websites. I felt a wave of panic. I was being treated by a TMJ specialist I had paid thousands of dollars to, and I was developing new problems!

I told the TMJ guru that the clicking was scaring me and driving me nuts, and he told me that some people can develop new symptoms as the course of the treatment progresses, and I should stick with it. Then he asked me if I was still having trigger point massage, so I told him I was, and he cautioned me to be careful not to have any kind of massage or chiropractic treatment that moved the joint too much and might create the clicking problem. Yikes!

I was concerned about the massage warning from the TMJ specialist, so the next time I went to the massage therapist, I asked if she thought the massage could cause the clicking problem. She said she knew about clicking, and she had never heard of it being caused by massage. I had told her about the splint I was wearing at night, and she said she had heard of other people starting to get clicking problems after they started wearing a mouth guard or splint. My heart sank. Who was I supposed to trust?

Everyone seems to agree that stress makes TMJ worse. My worry about the jaw clicking was increasing my stress, and so was my worry over whether the massage or the splint might have caused the clicking. Then on top of that, there was stress from worrying about the worrying.

I was comforting myself by telling myself it couldn't get any worse, and then it got worse again, because I started getting migraines. If you have never had a migraine, you might think that's just another word for headache, but it's not. My migraines included really bad headaches, but the pain was more disabling than a headache, and for me the head pain was magnified by any amount of light brighter than a dimly lit room. Taking pain relievers didn't seem to do anything to relieve my migraines, so I got a referral to a neurologist.

I told my TMJ guru about the migraines, and he said those can be part of TMJ, and he would change me to a different "mouth appliance" to help prevent the migraines. I could not imagine how a mouth appliance was going to affect migraines, but I was willing to try anything to get rid of the migraines. The pain from them was much worse and more disabling than my original TMJ symptoms. The intensity of the pain and the need to be in a dark room when a migraine was happening made it impossible for me to function normally in life.

I work at an insurance company, so I knew all too well how difficult it might be to get disability coverage if my migraines made me unable to work, and if my migraines didn't totally disable me, it could be worse, because I might be seen as "just not able to cut it" in my job.

Before the new mouth appliance was ready, I saw a neurologist. He said there were several medications that might help, and it might be hit or miss until we found one that worked. I told him that I thought the migraines were part of my TMJ, and he told me that he had just been to a conference where he learned about research that pointed to how nighttime teeth clenching can cause migraines, and he asked me if I might be interested in trying some type of nighttime biofeedback thing that could help me stop clenching my teeth in my sleep.

Looking back on it, I guess that was my first real chance to get free from TMJ, but I didn't know it at the time, so I told him I was about full up to the eyeballs with the electronic gizmos used by the TMJ guru, so let's try the medications first, and if they don't work I can try the biofeedback thing.

The next week I got my "new mouth appliance" from the TMJ guru. It was totally different from the flat-plane splint. It didn't cover all my teeth. It was just a little piece of plastic that snapped onto my front teeth. The new thing was called an "NTI". NTI stood for the longest, most complicated, bombastic sounding name I could imagine.

My TMJ guru explained that the NTI was supposed to make it really uncomfortable to clench my teeth, so I would instinctively stop, and the migraines would go away. My ears perked up when he said that, because my neurologist had also said that stopping clenching my teeth in my sleep could stop the migraines.

I begin to doubt the TMJ specialist

The NTI appliance looked like a cheap little piece of plastic. My TMJ guru told me that normally it would cost $300, but I was getting it "free" as part of his TMJ treatment program. Free? Yeah, right, free for $5000.

Well, the NTI might work for some people, but for me it was a disaster. As soon as I started wearing it I started waking up with pain in my jaw joint (a TMJ symptom I had previously not had), and I was still getting the migraines, and the clicking, and bouts of the neck and ear and sinus pain I had when I first went to the TMJ guru. It seemed like every step I was taking, things were getting worse.

I wore the NTI piece of junk for about a week, but the pain in my jaw joint kept getting worse, and the migraines were not getting better. I went to see the TMJ guru again and told him the NTI was giving me terrible jaw joint pain. He told me that I was an unusually tough case, and that I should switch back to the flat-plane splint, but this time also take a muscle relaxer drug. He gave me a prescription and I left his office to head home.

In the parking lot I ran into a woman I had seen before in the waiting room of the TMJ guru. She asked me how my TMJ treatment was going, and I just started crying. I told her about my migraines and NTI, and I told her I had just been told that I had an unusually tough case of TMJ. She told me that he had told her the same thing. Just then I noticed that we were standing in front of a Porsche, with a license plate that began with "TMJ". Ugh.

I decided that since I had some bad reactions to drugs in the past, I would look up the side-effects of the muscle relaxers the TMJ guru had prescribed. I typed into Google "muscle relaxer side effects", and up came one of Google's little answer panels that said "Less serious side effects include: dry mouth or throat; blurred vision; drowsiness, dizziness, tired feeling; loss of appetite, stomach pain, nausea; diarrhea, constipation, muscle weakness". I decided that if those are the "less serious" side effects, there had to be a better way.

​Fortunately the migraine medication from the neurologist was helping some with the migraines, even though it didn't make them totally go away. I didn't like using the drug, but it helped enough with the migraines that I could keep earning a living.

A few days after deciding not to risk taking the muscle relaxers, I went for lunch with my friend Anne and we wound up sitting at a table next to a retired dental school professor.

My doubts confirmed…

The professor overheard me telling my TMJ tale of woe, and he wound up joining our conversation. He was kind of intense and kind of quirky. I was shocked to learn that he didn't think much of TMJ specialists. In fact he said that as far as he was concerned, the dentists who become "TMJ specialists" are "the charlatans of the profession". He said some use fancy machines that haven't been shown to help, but put on a good show. He said they charge big-up-front fees, and pay as much as $1000 or more as a referral fee to dentists who send them new patients, and some use treatments that can make things worse.

Oh, my, god. So my dentist could have made $1000 or more for sending me to someone who might make my situation worse? And all those machines could just be for show? That couldn't be true, could it?​

The professor seemed to agree with everyone else that clenching was the main cause of TMJ problems, but he also said that "clenching starts in the brain, not in the teeth". What a strange thought... I kept thinking about that afterward. Maybe I was clenching because of the dreams I was having at night? And if that was true, could I change the dreams? How? The professor had given me his card, so maybe I would e-mail him and ask.

My neurologist suggests a new TMJ treatment approach

A few weeks later I saw the neurologist again. When I told him about the things the professor said, he asked again if I wanted to try the biofeedback headband that might help me stop clenching my teeth in my sleep. I told him I was already doing biofeedback at the office of the TMJ specialist, and I could not imagine being hooked up to a machine like that at night. He told me that nighttime biofeedback was totally different.

He said that the kind of biofeedback the TMJ guru uses is to help you become less tense, so you have to pay attention to a computer screen all the time when it is running, but the nighttime biofeedback is meant to help you change the clenching habit, so there is no need to pay attention when you're not clenching. He said that while the office biofeedback machine works through having wires stuck to your face, the nighttime headband is just worn on your head while you sleep and doesn't have any wires.

"How does it work? How is it supposed to help me stop clenching?", I asked the neurologist. He told me that the biofeedback headband has an electronic module in the front a little bigger than a watch. He said that when it catches you clenching, it makes a gentle sound to remind you to relax your jaw, so all you have to do is learn to respond to it in your sleep.​

I don't know about you, but when I first heard him say that, the first thing I wondered was whether the thing is supposed to wake me up like a bed-wetting alarm. He assured me that it is NOT meant to wake you up, but I would probably need to practice a little each day to train my subconscious mind how to respond without me having to wake up. He said most people can learn to respond very well in their sleep, and if I am one of the people who can learn to do that, the headband could help me stop clenching quite fast.

"And if it doesn't work for me, how much money am I out?", I asked him. "Zero", he replied. "It's free to try, and if it works for you, I think it's a few hundred dollars." Well, the free trial was a relief, and if it worked it would be well worth it. The neurologist said that two of his patients got great results with it, but another patient had not been able to sleep well with it. A two out of three chance sounded good to me, so I decided to go for it, and the neurologist told me how to order it on-line.

Three days later, the nighttime biofeedback headband gizmo was delivered to my house in a box about half the size of a loaf of bread. I read the instructions and put the headband on my head. I took a look in the mirror. It was definitely not a fashion statement, but if it could help me get rid of my migraines by helping me to stop clenching my teeth in my sleep, I decided I would consider it to be a "super powers" fashion accessory.

I turned it on, tried briefly clenching, and sure enough, as soon as I started to lightly clench my teeth, the thing would make a quiet sound almost instantly. I was anxious to see if I could respond to it in my sleep, but the instructions said that for the first few days I should wear it with the sound turned off while I slept, to get used to sleeping with it on my head, and to measure how much clenching I was typically doing at night. So for the next three nights, that 's what I did.

The first night, the headband measured 63 clenches, and a total of 121 seconds of clenching. I had no idea if that was a lot or a little for someone with TMJ problems, so I called the company on the phone. The guy who answered the phone turned out to be Lee Weinstein, the MIT guy who invented the thing! That was a nice surprise. He was very encouraging, and happy to answer my questions. I learned that 100 seconds of clenching per night was about average for someone who had pain every day related to TMJ. I also learned that the nightly total clenching time measured is more important than the number of clenches, because the time is a better measure of how much damage is done each night by the clenching.

The next day I followed the instructions and did a few two-minute practice sessions with the headband on my head, to start training my subconscious mind to relax my jaw each time the sound came on while I was asleep. In each practice session, I would lightly clench just long enough to hear the very beginning of the quiet tone the headband makes when it catches you clenching.

The idea when practicing is to relax and stop clenching as soon as you hear the tone, and then to imagine yourself instinctively relaxing your jaw each time you hear that sound in your sleep.

You only clench for a fraction of a second each time you practice, and the relaxing and imagining takes about another ten seconds, so I probably practiced about 8 times in the two minutes. Then I did an extra practice session about an hour later, and another extra two minutes about an hour after that, because I REALLY wanted to get rid of my migraines. The other pains I could probably learn to live with (scary thought), but not the migraines.

It doesn't say so in the manual, but I recommend wearing the headband for a while around the house in between practice sessions. When I did that I noticed that each time I swallowed, the quiet tone would sound briefly. I guess it said that in the manual, but I think it was important for my subconscious to learn that, so it wouldn't think something was wrong when the sound came on briefly when I swallowed in my sleep.

My Triumph over TMJ begins

On the fourth night, I wore the headband to bed with the sound turned on. I think my subconscious was so excited to respond to the sound, or I was so interested to find out when I was clenching, that I woke up the first few times it made a sound. But here's the really weird thing: the third time I woke up, I realized that I had been enjoying the teeth-clenching feeling in the dream I was having! Oh my god. How could that be? How could it feel good to clench in my sleep when it was so bad for me?​

Now that I think about it, I realize maybe that's not different from any other addictive habit that becomes hard to stop. It feels good at the time, and then it beats the crap out of you.

My first three nights using the headband (without the sound turned on), my nightly clenching times were between 100 and 150 seconds. My first night with the sound turned on, my clenching time for the night dropped down to 33 seconds. I still felt bad and had a headache that morning, but at least the number showed that I was responding in my sleep and clenching less.

I called Lee again to find out how my drop from 100 seconds to 33 seconds compared with other people. He said it was a bit better than average, and that I should keep doing the daytime practice each day until I got my nightly clenching time to below one tenth of what it started at. So that meant I would keep doing my daily practice sessions until I got my nightly clenching time below 10 seconds.

Meanwhile, I was keeping track of my headaches in a headache journal for the neurologist. After a week of having the headband sound turned on at night, my nightly clenching time was below 15 seconds per night, and I started having days with no headache. What a blessing! No pain in my head for a day! Then two days! Then a week!

I kept doing my practice each day. Some nights it seemed I would slide backward and my clenching time would go up a little, but over all it kept going down.​

After a few weeks, I woke up feeling pretty good one morning and decided to go to my health club and work out. When I got there, I realized I had not been there in months. How many months? I couldn't remember. I did my workout and I felt great.

I had been to see the TMJ specialist a couple of times since starting to use the biofeedback headband, but I hadn't told him about it yet. I guess I didn't want him to feel like my neurologist had recommended something that was competing with him, but feeling great after my workout, I decided to tell him about the headband. I thought he might want to tell more people about it, but he just said "You don't need that thing because we already do biofeedback at your sessions here". Then he went on to say what a great job his splint was doing at treating my TMJ. Such an ego. I decided that instead of telling him more about it, I would write about it to the professor.

I heard back from the professor the next day and he encouraged me to keep going with the nighttime biofeedback and let him know how it turns out.

For the first few weeks, I was using the biofeedback headband along with the splint, but then I read an article on the web saying how toxic the acrylic plastics are that dentists make mouth guards and splints out of, so I decided to stop using the splint and keep using the headband. I never liked having the splint in my mouth anyway, and my nightly clenching time actually went down when I stopped using it. I think the splint had helped in the beginning, but it was clear to me I didn’t need it any more.

By the time I had been using the biofeedback headband for two months, my migraines, neck pain, sinus pain, and ear pain were totally gone, and then I realized my jaw wasn't clicking any more either. The biofeedback headband had become my new best friend. Responding to it in my sleep had become totally automatic, and I didn't need to practice any more. My nightly clenching time was down to 5 seconds or less on most nights, and I felt great.

I guess other people could tell I felt great, because I started getting asked out for the first time since my divorce. I'm not going to go into any detail about how getting rid of TMJ improves your love life or how well you can do at your job, but I think you can imagine.

A few weeks later I went to my regular dentist for a cleaning, and she commented that an area of my gums that had been receding seemed to be getting better. She asked me how things were going with my TMJ and I told her I was much better, and I told her about the biofeedback headband.

She ignored what I said about the biofeedback headband and told me she was glad I was seeing the TMJ specialist. I hadn't even told her that I had seen the TMJ specialist, so that answered my un-asked question about whether she got paid a referral fee. I decided to just let it go. I was just grateful to be feeling good.

In fact I was so happy to be feeling good again, it's hard to describe. I realized my neurologist would want to hear my success story, so I called him up and thanked him and told him how well I was doing. I also called Lee (the guy who invented the headband) and thanked him also. He was enthusiastic about my success, and encouraged me share it with other people.

And that leads me back to why I am writing this letter for Lee to put on the website of the SleepGuard biofeedback headband, because unless you are lucky enough to run into a well informed neurologist and a retired dental school professor, you would probably never learn what I was lucky enough to learn, and you might suffer with TMJ for a long time.

There's one more reason I am writing this letter to you. As I mentioned, I work at an insurance company, so after I got rid of my TMJ, I decided to try to figure out how to get the cost of the biofeedback headband reimbursed through my insurance. It took me a while, but I totally succeeded. I wrote a report on it, with the intent of selling it on-line to earn back the $5000 I wasted on the TMJ specialist, but for a short time, I am letting Lee give you a copy free if you ask for it.

Now that you've read what I went through, you don't have to go through the bad parts yourself (unless you already have). If I can triumph over TMJ, so can you! Do yourself a favor and try the SleepGuard biofeedback headband so you can get TMJ out of your life fast. You have everything to gain, and nothing to lose except your pain.

Sincerely,

Susan Davis

P.S. If you are wondering if you could get to the point where you have totally trained yourself out of clenching your teeth in your sleep so you don't even need the biofeedback headband any more, my opinion is yes, because I did it. It just took a few more months after I got to the point where I was feeling great. Lee was very good about giving me individual coaching over the phone for no charge. He has probably helped far more people free themselves from TMJ than anyone else who has ever lived, so I recommend calling him if you have any questions.

P.P.S. I've worked in the insurance industry for a long time, and I can see change coming before it happens. Right now benefits are good, but I can see the writing on the wall after the recent election – a lot of insurance benefits are going to be changing, and my gut tells me if you want to get reimbursed for your TMJ cure, you should order your free trial of the SleepGuard biofeedback headband pronto!