What people usually notice first
- Pain in front of the ear, in the cheek, or across the temple
- Clicking, popping or grating when opening or closing
- A jaw that catches, locks briefly, or does not open as wide as it did
- Headaches, particularly around the temples
- Waking with a tight, tired jaw: often a sign of night-time grinding
- Earache or a blocked-ear feeling with no ear infection to explain it
What is often going on
The temporomandibular joint is one of the most-used joints in the body. It has a disc inside it, it moves in more than one plane, and it is driven by muscles that are also involved in holding your head up.
That last point is the one that gets overlooked. The jaw does not hang in isolation: its resting position depends on where your head sits over your shoulders. Spend eight hours a day with your head carried forward over a laptop and the mechanics of the joint change, along with the load on the muscles working to keep the mandible where it should be.
Add sustained clenching, whether from stress or from grinding at night, and you have a joint being loaded hard, repeatedly, in a slightly altered position. Joints adapt to how they are loaded, and this is what that adaptation can look like.
How we assess it
The examination covers the jaw itself — how far it opens, whether it tracks straight, where it clicks in the range, how the surrounding muscles behave — and then the upper cervical spine and your habitual head posture, because those are so frequently part of the picture.
We are also looking for the things that mean this is not ours to treat: signs of inflammatory joint disease, a dental or bite problem that needs a dentist, or anything else that warrants referral.
What care might involve
Where the assessment supports it, treatment generally addresses both ends of the problem: the joint and muscles locally, and the neck and postural loading that keeps feeding it.
- Adjustment of the upper cervical spine where movement has been lost, and gentle work to the jaw itself where appropriate
- Soft tissue work to the muscles of mastication and the surrounding neck musculature
- Cold laser therapy where irritability is a feature
- Exercise and postural retraining: the part that changes the loading rather than settling the current flare
When someone else should be involved
If the problem is driven by your bite, by significant grinding that would benefit from a splint, or by an inflammatory arthritis affecting the joint, you need a dentist or a medical practitioner in the picture. We will tell you that rather than treating around it, and the approaches work well together.
Related
Jaw pain frequently travels with headaches, neck pain and tech neck. It is also worth mentioning if you have had whiplash, since jaw symptoms often follow neck trauma.