My thoughts on "TMJ dentists"
Ok, i'll be honest. TMJ dentists are only a step above palm readers in my book... hahahahaha
Check out the video of this article…
Now onto the article…
TMJ dentists are to me a bit like calling yourself an “AI expert” these days. You could be anyone with almost any qualification and still call yourself an “AI expert”.
Because it’s a bit of the wild west. You don’t know who’s right, who’s wrong.
What are the “correct” therapies? Whose patients are actually making progress? Which dentists are full of shit?
And the dentists to me feel a bit like palm readers. They’re peddling their method without any real proof that it works. And if you ask for proof or to talk to some actual patients that they fixed, they give you the runaround.
Yeah… welcome to the TMJ world. lol
I once ‘believed’ in TMJ dentists
In 2013 I went to my first TMJ dentist in Ukraine. It was because a different dentist that was cleaning my teeth told me he thought I might have TMJ.
He recommended me a specialist to go to who was considered one of the best in Ukraine and I went.
That person gave me a dental splint that was more or less flat and would drill some contacts with articulating paper every couple weeks.
Muscle tightness in my throat, neck and back that had bothered me for over a decade started to go away.
I thought this guy was like God. He was a miracle worker.
Unfortunately I didn’t really understand why it worked and I had to leave Ukraine a bit later.
But I learned to stop believing the hard way, like almost everyone else
In early 2014 I moved from Ukraine to Vietnam and had chewed through the dental splint that the Ukrainian dentist had given me.
So I went to a Vietnamese dentist and told him to make me the same.
That dentist had a slightly different philosophy and gave me something that was similar, but not exactly the same.
It felt to me like my symptoms were coming back. And so when I complained he told me the best thing was for me to let him drill down some incorrect ‘contacts’ between my upper and lower teeth.
I trusted him and so i let him do it. Then all hell started to break loose.
My body felt like it was aging at an accelerated rate and I couldn’t retain information.
I didn’t understand what was happening to me. But I knew that it was somehow related to the drilling of my teeth that I let this dentist do because i’d never had anything like this happen to me before.
I switched to a different dentist and asked him to fix me.
That one did some type of splint method and it felt like I was getting worse.
I switched again. Did another treatment.
Switched again.
I think i went through like 7-8 different dentists in 2014 as I was desperate. I couldn’t function on my job and that was not sustainable. I’d have to quit and move from Vietnam if I didn’t get better.
Meanwhile my wife was about to give birth.
I wouldn’t have wished what I went through in 2014 on my worst enemy. I was a strong person who’d been thru a lot of shit.. but this was a whole other level of hell.
It was physical hell + mental hell + zero support as we had no friends or family there + supporting a pregnant wife who was living abroad for the first time.
And despite all of the promises each of these dentists had given me, nothing was working.
With each one I lost a bit more faith in the profession.
I also began educating myself on Facebook groups
At the same time I’d started joining a lot of TMJ-related Facebook groups. And started to realize I was not alone. There were tons of other patients with stories like mine that had lasted years. Some even decades.
And I noticed that the TMJ dentists that participated in these groups often had contradicting philosophies.
It was the first time i’d encountered this.
To that point the medical world to me was relatively binary. I believed there was a right way to do things that was taught to them in school and everyone did it that way.
This is far from being the case in the TMJ realm.
Also there didn’t seem to be hard facts that you could point to. The ‘successful’ patients of all these TMJ dentists seemed to be completely absent in these groups.
Which left you wondering.. did they really exist? Or were these dentists more or less failing their patients each and every time.
Qualifications don’t matter when what they are taught is wrong
The other thing that I had to adjust to was the fact that qualifications are meaningless in this realm.
It is not that you should go to a dentist from a better dental school or something like that… because what they were taught in school as it pertains to TMJ was obviously wrong.
It’s not like surgery where everyone does more or less the same thing, and therefore the best surgeons in the world are recognized as such.
In the TMJ world it’s more like they all suck and don’t get results…and so you’re just trying to find one that seems to be actually getting some results and is willing to talk to you long enough to show some evidence of this.
Trust me.. it is frustrating as hell!
There isn’t a TMJ dentist out there that I think is getting consistent results
It is important to note that I spent a shitload of time in TMJ-related dental groups from mid 2014 till about mid- 2018. That is four years.
And there were lots of dentists in these groups.
Plus there were lots of patients telling their stories.
I’d read my Facebook newsfeed and probably go through about 20 posts a day across all the various groups I was in.
And in all that time, guess how many dentists I found that I truly had confidence in…
…drumroll please!!!!!
ZERO
I had confidence in zero dentists. They all just seemed to be a bunch of bickering merchants in a Turkish bazaar.
And it’s why I vowed to get really good at DIY (Do it yourself). Which i did. But at the expense of screwing myself up and fixing it many times over a period of what is now a decade.
But finally i figured it out.
And what I figured out led me to conclude one thing… there isn’t a single dentist out there that i know of who fully ‘gets’ this stuff.
Because I now know what that means now. And they’re far from it.
What was your solution?