Migraine Headaches

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.