Jaw pain- will Osteopathy help me?

How will Osteopathy help your jaw pain?

Osteopathy can help reduce the jaw pain signals that are being perceived by our brain by bringing the muscles and joints into better alignment, improving stability and by reducing counter productive tension. This ‘position of ease’ may be enough to bring you back below the threshold of pain and thus provide relief for your jaw pain.

Jaw pain can occur for many reasons and sometimes the pain in the jaw is actually referred from another region (read here for ‘the jaw, head and neck connection’ and watch here from ‘Referred pain and trigger points’). If the pain is truely caused by the jaw joint and/or it’s associated muscles then manual therapy, like Osteopathy, could provide one with substantial relief. So what will an Osteopath do for jaw pain and how does an Osteopath work?

Before we get started with Osteo treatment, we need to rule out disease

Before commencing hands on treatment it is important we rule out disease and ensure that what we are dealing with in the Osteo clinic here in Box Hill South is related to the muscles and/or joints. We do this by having a detailed discussion with you and try to understand your pain presentation.

Other conditions that may present as jaw pain could include tooth pain, neck pain, headaches, sinus pain or ear pain. But also tooth pain, neck pain, sinus pain or ear pain could be coming from the jaw! The sooner we can uncover the pain causing structures, the sooner we can get you better.

Jaw pain relief from an Osteopath

With hands on work we can address the pain causing structures in and around your jaw to provide you with relief. This may include hands on soft tissue work for jaw muscles and the muscles on the front of the throat. Treatment could also incldue articulation/gentle movement of the neck bones and even the skull bones. Myofascial release of the jaw muscles, head muscles, throat muscles or shoulder muscles may also be required. And sometimes dry needling for jaw pain can also be helpful treatment option.

Let’s understand how your jaw pain started

How did your jaw pain come about? What made you more susceptible to jaw pain?

Pain is complex and despite it being felt in one region, it is frequently multi faceted. I talk to my patients about their threshold of pain, like a 250mL glass, we have a finite capacity. Similar to our capacity for pain, we can tolerate a fair bit before spilling over and experiencing something like jaw pain.

And perhaps your environment or posture is filling up too much of “your glass” so that your threshold for something like jaw pain has been lowered.

So part of Osteopathy treatment becomes looking at increasing your capacity/ increasing your threshold for pain.

Why hasn’t my jaw pain fixed itself?

Why hasn’t your jaw pain resolved? Why haven’t you felt relief from your jaw pain?

The body is an amazing machine and frequently has the capacity to heal itself- so why has your jaw pain remained? Some of the factors discussed earlier like environment and posture can play an important role when discussing maintaining factors. For jaw pain this can sometimes relate to one’s bite or the way their teeth come together, and if this is the case we need work work closely with your Dentist.

Individualised and specialised care for jaw pain

Then last and definitely not least we need to sit down and have an honest chat about you- what are your treatment goals, your timeline, your priorities and what are you willing to do to achieve these goals. There is probably no point prescribing you 17 exercises to do multiple times a day or maybe you don’t care that your jaw clicks, all you really want is to eat a hamburger without jaw pain!

We need to understand you, this way we can put together an achievable and realistic treatment plan. When you’re ready, we shall see you in Box Hill South :)