At TMJ Home Remedies, I’ve spent a great deal of time talking about my own personal journey with temporomandibular joint disorder. I’ve talked to you about doing yoga techniques, acupuncture visits, and additional home remedies that have worked well for me over the years. But what is the biggest TMJ pain treatment option to steer clear of? In fact, which one should you sprint away from as fast as your little legs will carry you?
Today, with the help of the fantastic site TMJ.org, I am going to show you the top TMJ pain treatment option to avoid. By avoiding the unproven treatment option of surgery, you’ll greatly reduce your medical bills and save yourself from possibly experience prolonged pain down the road.
Surgery
The most unproven and controversial TMJ pain treatment option is surgery for your disorder. Here’s how I feel about surgery: it should be avoided at all costs.
I can’t stress this point enough. There are no long-term studies that validate TMJ surgery as a safe and effective means of treatment. In fact, there isn’t even criteria to determine which individuals are or are not the best candidates for surgery. Moreover, just because you’ve tried a few other options (either home remedies or those suggested by doctors) doesn’t mean you should automatically choose a surgical procedure as your next step. Make sure to exhaust every possible treatment option before you even sit down and explore this possibility with your doctor. I’d also recommend you seek out a second and even third opinion if you honestly feel that surgery is your only hope after trying every other possible method.
A few additional reasons to avoid this particular TMJ pain treatment method:
- Post-surgery, you’ll probably have to take quite a few side-effect inducing pain medications. The cost of these meds alone can quickly evaporate your savings.
- If you’ve already had TMJ surgery in the past, there’s no guarantee that an additional procedure will be the one to fix your problems. In fact, the more times you invade the tissue the greater the risk for complications down the line.
- Due to the lack of research on the effectiveness of TMJ surgery, it’s hard to know which specific doctor is the best in his or her field. It’s going to be hard to find the best without even knowing who the best really is.
It’s critical that you educate yourself on the topic of surgery for TMJ disorder. For additional information, here is a great PDF you can access on TMJ.org’s page created by The National Institute of Health. It contains additional information on TMJ pain treatment options that you might want to stay far away from.
Lastly, always remember that there are tons of safe and all-natural home remedies you can start doing today in lieu of these sketchy procedures. Through basic stretching and breathing exercises – combined with alterations to your diet – you can attain pain relief starting … NOW!
