Why nobody knows what’s wrong with your jaw
By: Orthodontic Negligence Victims
Tags: Jaw, Dentistry, Tmj, Orthodontics, Negligence

If I might set the tone with an analogy: what’s the difference between a cowboy builder and a chartered engineer? The answer is that a cowboy builder will do something that looks ok, but you have no idea how long it will hold up or how it will function. An engineer, on the other hand, will painstakingly calculate or create a computer simulation of the forces on an object, to predict how well it will hold up, how long it will function and how it might wear with use.

Dentists, orthodontists and joint surgeons do not calculate or create simulations of the forces on your teeth and jaws. They are all doing it by eye until it looks alright. They are cowboy builders. The entire industry.

Ever wondered why dentistry is considered separate from the rest of medicine, as if teeth were a separate entity to the rest of the human body? They’re not — the teeth are the contact points of your jaw. The way your jaw bone fits in the socket or moves around it when you close your mouth depends of how your teeth fit or don’t fit. This is obvious from any diagram of the jaw and also from Newton’s third Law, one of the best established facts that exists. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction and this principle applies to the contact surface of your teeth as much as anything else in the universe. When your jaw muscles contract and your teeth meet, the geometry of the contact surface determines the reciprocal forces on your jaw muscles, the order and strengths that they tense, how your jaw bone moves and whether it rubs the nerves in the socket. Let me tell you, your jaw bone rubbing the nerves in the socket burns like hell, and there are no pills for it. Its between having your funny bone hit and being burned alive.

The unfortunate reason that dentistry is kept separate from medicine is that the professionals are incapable of dealing with the mechanics of teeth and jaws, so they simply ignore the concept, claiming no evidence of it. For all the marketing of ‘excellence’ and ‘perfection’, there is a fundamental incompetency at the heart of dentistry. Nobody can see forces. Nobody can tell how your jaw is functioning by looking at your teeth, the outside of your face or a static scan of the joint. It is impossible.

If you have been abandonned with jaw pain, or are being sent in circles around maxillofacial, dental and oral pain clinics, I suggest you might have a problem with how the teeth fit relative to your jaw. Unfortunately there is no system that scans and simulates the forces on your teeth and jaws but there are some useful diagnostics tests that are widely ignored.

Firstly, there are bite pressure sensors that measure the forces over your teeth as you close your mouth. If you’re not biting with even pressure either side it is a good indication of a disalignment of your teeth and jaw. This doesn’t tell you the forces on your jaw however — nothing does.

While there is no test to measure the forces between your jaw bone and socket, the next best thing is to have a static cbct scan done with your teeth together, as you can infer whether it is rubbing or displacing. Usually when you close your mouth your jaw bone should be in the socket, hanging on muscles and sliding on a thin disc. If your bite pushes your joint too far in or back it can aggravate the nerves and even damage your joint. If your bite brings your jaw bone out of the socket, it can pop, lock and even dislocate.

Having a scan with your teeth together is such a basic, logical thing to do it should be considered gross negligence to deny a patient such a test, yet this is the norm. Any dentist, orthodontist or doctor can refer a patient for a cbct scan but they won’t. They don’t want to know. They don’t want such concepts to exist. The cognitive dissonance is extraordinary.

Instead of acknowleging their limits in dealing with mechanical motion, they preach about the ‘biopsychosocial’ model of jaw dysfunctions, as if the patients are manifesting emotional trauma as physical pain.