The Great Fakeout

In this TMJ game... i've found that when you are getting worse you often think you are getting better. And when you're getting better, you often think you are getting worse.

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Now onto the article…

Your brain tricks. you in this game. It’s one of the biggest reasons cracking it for good took me so long.

By this I mean that when you’re getting worse… my brain often told me I was getting better.

And when I was getting better i’d sometimes go through headaches and pain that would lead me to think I was getting worse.

This is one of the biggest reasons why I think TMJ patients go in circles for so long. They conclude that they are getting worse when they are not.

Today i’ll explain more about what I mean and relate it in my experience.

I’ve been through many circles in the past decade

Between the years of 2016 - 2021 I did many many circles.

Meaning i’d do something for awhile… then decide to myself that it was wrong and switch to something else.

There were times when I was switching my approach a few times a week. And other times when i’d switch after a few months.

What i was switching between was usually a mix of:

• Starecta (ie. an indexed splint that I ‘re-registered’ frequently)

• A flat plane splint with contact either on the back tooth or on the back four teeth

• A myobrace or a Sodis appliance

• An upper ALF

• An Open bite

I’d do one of these approaches or sometimes a couple of them at the same time.

And I would think that i could ‘feel’ what was right.

That turned out to be complete bullshit. The signals I were getting were often wrong.

The most confusing thing was not having clear indicators

By this I mean that there was no clear correlation between symptoms and how I felt to what was truly the right or wrong approach.

I’ll give you an example…

Everytime i went with an open bite (I naturally had an open posterior bite ever since early 2015) and would not wear any appliance, I would feel good for the first couple of weeks.

I would often describe it as ‘landing back on Earth from Mars’.

You felt like you were yourself more. And so you’d internally conclude… “Wow this must be right. I feel much more myself than i did last week.”

And so I returned to an open posterior bite many times over the years up until i finally figured this stuff out in mid 2021. The reason being that I always felt more ‘normal’ each time.

But this was absolutely the wrong thing to do. And so even though I ‘thought’ i was improving.. i was actually reversing all of my previous progress.

It took using an open bite for almost an entire year from late 2019 to mid 2020 or so, and absolutely destroying my skull & body during that time to figure out… “no… this shit is definitely fucking wrong.”

You will often feel a bit ‘off your head’ as you recover

Now when I reflect on this…. I like to say that the right way to feel as you recover is to feel a bit off your head. LOL

As in i’m a bit strange/crazy at times. I can even be a bit aggressive sometimes.

And i’m in a good mood almost constantly. But my wife says it is a bit of a weird good mood.

Am i the ‘normal ken’? Not really. My wife will definitely vouch for that hahaha

But what i’ve come to accept over the last few years as I’ve recovered is that this is what you feel like as things improve.

Eventually I developed a clear way of measuring progress… the ‘Tracking splint’

What I call the ‘tracking splint’ was a major step forward in my progress towards figuring this stuff out. And it’s funny because I first started doing this in late 2016 when my ALF dentist at the time showed me how to do it.

The idea was to using a splint like the one shown above and then biting on it with articulating paper. You would then use a dental drill to drill down all of the heavy contacts.

Then you would bite with the paper again and drill again… over and over till the contacts were even.

I was doing this pretty much everyday. As it was fun. lol

What I noticed was that the plane of the splint would evolve such that there was more of a curve (ie. the back would be a lot higher than the front).

Then i forgot about it for awhile but would piece this part of the puzzle together with what Marcello was talking about in 2018 when he would tell me about the importance of the ‘curve of spee’.

I already discuss that in depth here so I won’t repeat it here:

The Curve of Spee

But essentially what both he and i agree with is that to be healthy… you need a healthy curve of spee. And so that is the north star that i used to help guide me these past few years.

Especially in late 2021 and early 2022.

Many indicators take weeks or months to exhibit themselves

Using the tracking splint and the curve of spee is what gave me the confidence that I was on the right track and should not veer from it.

Then as the months went on more and more things improved…

• Cognitive function

• Attention span

• My body

• My energy

• My complexion

• The thickness of my hair

• etc

And now i’m doing absolutely awesome against pretty much every criteria.

But what I noticed was that these were not things that just shot up in the first few weeks. It took months. Sometimes many months before I could see and feel noticeable improvements in these things.

Which is why you cannot really use them in the short-term to gauge whether you’re going the right way.

And that ends up being the mistake of literally the vast majority of TMJ patients. They are making the wrong conclusions even when they are going in the right direction.

Which is why i call that… “The Great Fake Out”