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notmuchtoconceal · 11 months

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Hey guys, Dr. Ricky from Tailored Teeth. I have a fantastic video for you today, it's about Bruxism! aka Stressed People Disease!

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Now, I'm sure you feel it.

You have stress from your work environment. You have stress from the expectations of people relying on you, or people around you; you have stress from, perhaps, poor posture. You have stress from your screen time and phone use and notifications!

When I went through uni about ten years ago, Bruxism! as a disease was only experienced by about 20% of people.

I'd say that, in my demographic, in my clinical practice in Sydney, I'd say -- 80% is closer to the mark? ... almost everyone nowadays... due to the changes in our lifestyles over the past five or ten years especially, has been grinding and clenching and posturing and holding so much tension in their face.

I wanna give you guys a working defiintiion of Bruxism!

Bruxism is when environmental stress turns into psychological stress which gradually accumulates until (and, everyone has a limit!) you reach that limit and it boggles out into physiological symptoms and generally that's tension or holding. particular. muscles. tight. ugh...

and it's how your brain literally kind of ... moves things out of that psychological space so you remain functional.

How it does that it is ... clenching, grinding, holding tension in your face, massterda, generally increasing the tone in that lower half of your face.

[pulls an anatomically correct human skull from out beneath his desk]

This is Geoffrey! :D

Geoffrey has very kindly volunteered to demonstrate how this tension actually builds up! :DDD

So it starts off with the massterda, which is the main muscle responsible for clenching and chewing force. The massterda muscle will increase its tension and, actually, hypertrophy, actually get thicker and stronger until the amount of force you can exert on your teeth gets really high and...! we actually start damaging the teeth themselves.

The next muscle that gets the tension after the massterda is the temporalis, which is just on the inside here and goes up to the side of your head there. This is the one that's responsible for tension headaches and it can actually extend that tension into... neck pain, making existing neck issues worse, but sometimes actually causing it in the first place!

The other, smaller muscles that are implicated in Bruxism! are your lateral and medial Pteragyoid, which you can see on the inside here -

and when the tension accumulates in these muscles, we'll end up with TMD or temporomandibular joint dysfunction, which effectively means this joint which should be rotating and translating will actually start to... dislocate.

[clank]

You don't want it to get to there.

A little more about the consequences of not doing anything about Bruxism! and stress! ~ The masseter muscle we talked about, cracked teeth. Cracked teeth will obviously be more sensitive and painful than healthy teeth; but another couple of things that you probably haven't thought of is that, the cracks that are perfect for bacteria to just wheel into liek that and start causing decay inside the tooth; there's very little you can do about it even if you have real good oral hygiene, the bacteria and the cracks are too fine and too small for you to be able to do anything, so you will end up needing more fillings than you would have otherwise. Also some procedures; even cosmetic procedures like whitening are contraindicated! So it's not suitable for patients with really severely, cracked teeth to have whitening procedures because the sensitivity can be absolutely unbearable. The TMD --dysfunction of the temporomandibular joint can result in locking of the jaw joint so you open like this :-- but physically can't close (or c l o s e ) or you physically can't open ( ) if the joint comes out of the socket. You will also get a little bit of clicking ... as the joint sort of moves out of place ... ah, also you can end up with muscle and pain even in the joint itself, ah leading to tension and pain elsewhere in the mouth and head! Chronic pain and headaches that can lead from the temporalis, that fan-shaped muscle up there can result in tension headaches throughout the entire scalp.

All of these can be avoided!

I wanna just give you some tips on how to identify, maybe even self-diagnose, so you can take some steps to preventing some of the more serious consequences of Bruxism!

Now, unfortunately, self-diagnosis with this particular disease can be incredibly difficult because the same process that actually puts the tension in there -- will mask its existence, so you have anxiety.

and. and. tension.

and that's building up in the lower half of your face and that causes more anxiety itself, meaning that you want to push down these symptoms; the implication of that is that, inevitably, for you to start adressing that, it's going to get worse as you bring these symptoms to your attention before it starts getting better.

Another thing that you can check for is the presence of something called a linea alba, that's Latin for" white line" and you can see it inside the cheek and it actually is a thickening of the alignment of the cheek because of that friction that's constantly being caused by the clenching and the friction of the grinding on the cheek itself.

One thing you can do at home -- the trigger point between the messeter and the temporalis is right here -- you feel for the bone -- this is called the zygomatic arch -- and you just press in there, you move your finger while you press the quiet part back -- and forward in an arc, just underneath that bone, and you may notice that the pain radiates backwards towards your ear or maybe inwards towards your joint, or upwards towards your temporal, and that can be indication there is a lot of tension that's being held in the lower half of the face.

Ayhm.

Another thing you can check -- if you just put your fingers over the masseter muscles, and little bit lower than the trigger point -- and clench -- how much does the masseter actually move? If it's moving quite a lot like a bicep muscle that you're just trying to flex, then that's a concern.

These muscles should not be able to clench and tense that far.

Another few ways you can pick it up is if you have tension in the sides of your face, or at the top here when you wake up in the morning, you may feel that these muscles on the side here, when you're eating chewy or hard food start to actually get fatigued, like DOMS (Delayed Onset Mind/Muscle Soreness) after you've had a really intense training tension.

Ayhm.

Another sign may be tension of headaches on the side of the head, or on the top of the head, on the scalp.

Now, say you've gone through this self-diagnosis process and you have identificed that you might have a problem with Bruxism!

What is there to do? The first step is official diagnosis by a doctor! And how to have them guide you as to how to gain some awareness of this process, because without addressing the root cause (which is your stress management!) it's just going to keep going,

That might be okay!

Say you're just in the middle of an insane project at work, you know it's going to end, but you can feel this damage occurring?

Talk to a doctor about it!

There may be something that we can do just as a band-aid solution for the period of time while you are really stressed and damaging your health before it actually becomes a permanent degeneration of that part of your body, be it the joint or the muscle or the amount of tension, or your ... stress management.

We have a ... an entire protocol, I call it The Bruxism Protocol! which just defines, effectively how to live a lifestyle that is not chronically stessing you, and it's little things - like how you interact with your phone, how you control your sleep hygiene, how you manage stress...

Uh, lil tips for the end and the start of the day, just to make each day a bit more productive and bit less stress inducing!

One ... treatment that has been very successful for me ... in my ... patients who are suffering with chronic pain from TMD and from Bruxism! is -- Muscle Relaxing Injections... strategically.

And again, get done by a doctor who knows what the anatomy is, and isn't just putting botox wherever they should put botox...

We start with the masseter muscles, there might be some compensation by the temporalis, like we've shown you...

And just managing that very closely can have very very good effects on patients, especially if you're currently in a lot of pain from this disease.

Ah! Lastly, and one of my favorite things at the moment is splint therapy. So you know that you cannot be damaging your teeth anymore. You know that the ligaments and the cracks and all of those things will not be progressing, and if it's done really well and monitored really closely you will actually relax the temporalis and the masseter muscles!

I know that's a lot of information guys, and thank you so much for making it this far through the video. If you have any questions of concerns, please let me know. And if you believe this video will benefit anyone you know, please it share it with them.

Thank you very much, and keep smiling !

#cool boys keep pet skulls #hey cutie

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