Recently, researchers and medical providers have come to the realization that everything in our body is connected.
Any problems at the bottom of our body (legs, feet) affect everything above, and seemingly harmless dental problems impact everything below. Everything seems so connected that researchers and doctors are busy making wholesome and necessary changes to problems from head to toe.
Dentists are starting to use neuromuscular dentistry to measure any imbalances in the efficiency and balance of the teeth in your mouth. This new and advance practice uses a Tekscan medical device which precisely measures the pressure that each individual tooth exerts. It’s a very similar device to those used at the Hospital for Special Surgery to measure foot dynamics when assessing ankle pain, foot, hip, knee and back complaints. At first, it may seem that gauging individual tooth pressure seems like an overkill. But medical professionals have a serious concern.
Why the concern?
Just as a imbalance or misalignment in our feet lead to problems in our hips, knees, back, neck, and shoulders, so can an unbalanced bite lead to problems in our ears, jaw, and TMJ. It can also change how we look, and hence our self confidence. An underlying muscular pathology can not only break down our teeth, but also affect our fillings, crowns, veneers and onlays we implant for teeth replacement.
One area of major concern is the TMJ area, with the problematic areas of myofascial pain (pain in neck and jaw), internal derangement of the TMJ “joint,” and inflammatory joint disease, synovitis and arthritis. TMJ dysfunction and pain can be dreadful, and if the remedy is based on proper diagnosis, this malady can be corrected. We can’t fix what troubles or ails us unless we examine efficient and proper bodily function as a whole.