Migraine
headaches are a huge problem. 30,000,000+ people in the United States suffer
from migraine headaches. There are many causes for migraine headaches but the
three main categories are dietary, environmental and physical. Dietary causes
relate to foods people eat that just did not agree with them and can trigger a
migraine. Second is environmental. When people are around certain things that
they may smell or come in contact with, it may have a toxic effect on their
body that can trigger a migraine headache. Third is physical. Brain vessel
abnormalities or neoplasms are in the mix but are certainly rare. Certain activities
that we do or overdo may cause headaches. Also listed in this group of physical
problems is stress. Very nebulous, how can stress cause headaches? People are
subjected to stress more and more, it's overwhelming and it's everywhere, but
how does the stress cause a headache?
I
have been a practicing dentist for over 40 years. More than 30 years ago I
developed a problem with severe or migraine headaches. They began to cluster
that was occurring two or three days in a row. I had no idea what could be
causing this problem and was worried. I went to the hospital and had an MRI
done and they could find no reason for the problem. I was not aware that I
might be clenching or grinding my teeth and I had no pain in my jaws or teeth.
Finally, one day I experienced some pain in my left TMJ. I decided to make a
device or guard to prevent my teeth from clenching and grinding. Not only did
it help with the pain in my jaw, but it also seemed to prevent the headaches
and also prevented the shoulder and neck pain I was experiencing.
How
can clenching the muscles in the jaw cause pain in the neck or shoulders and
headaches? I call this phenomenon musculoskeletal reflex balancing and I have
experienced this in other areas of my body. For example, I pulled some
cartilage in my rib cage one morning and by the end of the day, the pain had
traveled 180° to my back, right in back of the injury. Conversely in another
incident, I injured my back, and the next morning I had a muscle spasm, a
counterbalancing spasm in my abdomen, and actually popped a muscle there. If
you clench or grind your jaw muscles hard enough, you will get a reflex balancing,
triggering shoulder and neck muscle contraction and even headaches.
As
a result of this experience I became very interested in the subject, and took
numerous courses to study Temporomandibular Joint Syndrome (TMJ) pain and joint
pathology. I began to investigate the various types of appliances or guards to
help with problems related to joint pain and jaw pain. The standard
dentist-provided guard is a horseshoe device made for the upper or lower teeth
covering all the way back to the last tooth. I then began investigating a
device called the Nociceptive
Trigeminal Inhibition (NTI). This is a very small device covering only
the front two or three teeth. It can be fitted on the upper front teeth or the
lower front teeth and has a bar or ramp which hits the mid-line of the opposite
teeth. I found that this is the only device that has FDA approval for the
treatment of migraine headaches. In fact, one study they did showed 80+ percent
of migraine headache sufferers had improvement when wearing their device. This
device, however, has to be made by a dentist and costs hundreds of dollars.
Over
the last several years, I have been working on a device called GrindReliefN.
This device uses the mechanism of anterior mid-line focus to relax the muscles,
however, instead of just hitting the upper or lower mid-line, it hits both at
the same time. Therefore, it has double the mechanism of action. Also this
device is slightly larger than the NTI covering up to the bicuspid area. It is
sold online and now in some retail outlets at a fraction of the cost of the
NTI. The patient can form it at home with the aid of online video instructions.
We have numerous testimonies about how this device has saved people the pain
and suffering of shoulder, neck pain and migraine headaches when nothing else
has worked. If you're sick of the pain and medications treating this pain, then
GrindReliefN is worth investigating.
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