Use of locally acting anesthetics to interfere with toothache-induced headache allows one to assume that the painful experience was caused by afferent impulses arising from the stimulated tooth. Appropriate therapy will help resolve the matter. Toothaches can produce severe headache. Noxious stimulation of the tooth may produce sensations of fullness, numbness, and stiffness five minutes after the stimulation of a particular tooth. The temporomandibular joint syndrome or TMJ is probably overdiagnosed.
Actual incidence is much less than what is actually diagnosed.
Pain is caused by erosion of the bone of the glenoid fossa, with impaction of the condyles against the thin bone separating them from the dura and its rich nerve supply, irritation of the auriculotemporal nerve by uncontrolled medial and backward movement of the condyles, and irritation of the chorda tympani nerve by the condyle where it emerges from the tympanic plate at the medial edge of the glenoid fossa. According to Guralnick et al. Patients with organic disease probably make up only a small percentage of all patients with disorders of the temporomandibular joint. In this syndrome, the pain that is described is of moderate to severe intensity and is distributed over the vertex, occiput, supraorbital region, and about the ears. Pain intensity commonly increases as the day progresses.