Neuromuscular Dentistry - Treatment of Jaw Joint Clicks

Call our offices to schedule a Free Smile Assessment with Dr. Eric Wang:

Mosman Park location: 1/592 Stirling Hwy Mosman Park WA 6012 (08) 9468 3378

Perth location: 25/108 St Georges Terrace Perth WA 6000
(08) 9468 3327

Website URL: https://smiledesignstudio.com.au/trea...

I want to talk about my patient Kellie. So, Kellie presented to me for the treatment over jaw joint click. She also had headaches and jaw aches that she was concerned about. And we know that she was a heavy grinder and clencher. She wasn't really concerned all that much about the appearance of her smile. And you know, to be honest, I think she has quite a nice smile to begin with. I mean, obviously there are some gaps between the teeth. And she had a bit of crowning but mostly this treatment was about function rather than aesthetics. So what we did for her is we created a neuromuscular orthotic and we use that to create a new bite for her. And what that bite did was just open up the vertical dimension of her lower face. And this allowed us to create a bit of room and decompress the jaw joint. And that's what allowed us to get rid of that jaw joint click. Now in order to make that bite change permanent we then did orthodontic treatment. So, the use of Damon braces over a period of about 24 months to make that change permanent. So we can see here in these photos that we have made some alignment changes. And we've obviously close that gap and we've created a little more room, a little more space. But overall those alignment changes are quite minor. But what we do have is quite a major functional change. So you can see here in the before photos there are a lot more lines on her face and her muscles are a lot more tense. In the after photo, we can see she has a beautiful amazing smile. And although cosmetics wasn't the focus, we were still able to achieve a great result there. But the primary goal was function. And by increasing and changing her bite we were able to get rid of that jaw joint click, reduce her headaches and jaw aches, even also reducing the amount of grinding and severity of the clenching that she did. And you can see in her face, her muscles have a lot less tenacity and are much more relaxed than they were before.