You can feel the muscle that crosses your jaw joint if you place your fingers over the joint and pretend you are chewing.  That’s the massater.  You have two–one on each side.

You can also feel the temple muscles by placing your fingers on the sides of your head in line with your eyebrows and pretending to chew.   Again, this muscle is on each side of your head.  It the temporalis muscle.

There is a depression in your skull on each side and the temporalis muscle is packed in there.  It’s actually a pretty good sized muscle.

The red area in the picture is the muscle and the white area that attaches to the lower jaw bone is the tendon.

Beside causing head and jaw pain, these muscles can also cause pain in your teeth!  It’s not your teeth, though.  It’s trigger points in the muscle that fire into your teeth and cause it to feel like tooth pain.

What can you do to make the temporalis muscle relax so it will bother you less?

1.  Pull your hair.  If you do this correctly it is called ‘Cranial Fascial Release.’  Here’s how:

Glide your fingers through your hair at the scalp over your temple muscles.  Close or clench your fingers with hair laced between them.  As you do this, you will start pulling your hair at the roots or scalp.  You will feel the pull or stretch on your head.

This is different from holding your hair away from your head and pulling.  One woman told me, “Oh yes, I know about hair pulling–I had sisters!”  Ouch!

This type of pulling will help lift the skin and muscle and fascia from the bone.  It will help relax the muscle.

At first it will feel quite tender but if you can hold it for several seconds you will feel less tenderness.  That’s because the muscle is relaxing.

After a few sessions you can slightly twist your hand after you clench your fingers around your hair at the scalp.  Twist your clenched hand to the right and hold until you feel the muscle start to be less tender.  And then twist in the opposite direction.  It’s usually too tender to lift and twist the first time or two.

As you can see in the picture, this is a large, wide muscle.  Work the whole muscle by moving your hand to adjacent areas and starting the pulling again in each area.

You don’t have to do the whole muscle or both temple muscles at once.  You can do a little and take a break if your hand gets tired.  Just come back to it later when you are ready.

Some therapists try pressing into the temporalis muscles.  This doesn’t seem to work as well as pulling them and I, personally, find it to be pretty annoying.

2.  Apply either warm compresses or cold packs to these muscles.  If heat is the wrong choice, your muscles will feel a bit worse rather than better and more relaxed.   If that happens, switch to cold packs.  You can also use contrast therapy by applying heat, cold, heat, cold.

The good thing about applying heat or cold therapy is that you are also treating nearby muscles at the same time.  Check out the Ice & Heat Category here on the right hand side.

3.  There’s a good chance that the muscles at the base of your head are also involved.  Heat might be a fine treatment there at the top of your neck because heat is usually the treatment of choice for muscles.

But if the nerves are aggravated at the base of your skull then cold therapy is the way to go.

4.  Chewing food and gum may aggravate your symptoms OR chewing may help your muscles to relax.  It depends on the cause of your jaw pain and how tight the muscles are.

Pretending to chew with your lips closed and teeth apart may help your chewing muscles to relax.

5.  Posture can cause jaw pain.  Check your posture.  If your head is forward (in front of your body) rather than over your body it strains the muscles around the jaw.

If you have upper back and neck pain or knots in your back, there is a great chance that your posture needs improvement.

Gravity is always trying to pull us forward and down.  We can counteract that by keeping a strong back side from knees to head.  There are articles at http://SimpleStrengthening.com to help you strengthen your backside.

If you take action you can help your temporalis muscles relax and help your jaw to feel better naturally.

An abscess is an infection in the space around a tooth.  It needs to be treated by a dentist.  The first treatment is with an antibiotic to clear the infection and then you and your dentist will decide what to do next.

One man went to his doctor and to a dentist complaining about the pain in his face and the roof of his mouth.  They ‘couldn’t see’ anything.  The dentist ground down the surface of a molar guessing that that might have been the jaw pain problem.

But it wasn’t.

Neither doctor listened to his belief that he had an infection in his jaw.  (He could feel something was not right.)  Neither doctor prescribed antibiotics and the man was getting desperate to the point of thinking of killing himself.

Finally he found a maxillary surgeon (a jaw specialist) and that doctor immediately recognized the abscess from the x-rays and give him antibiotics to get rid of the infection.

The relief started within several hours.  Even though it was just a small improvement it meant a lot to the man.  Within several days he felt much better.

When his infection was cleared, he was able to have the tooth treated and has no more jaw pain.

Moral of the story:

If one doctor can’t help you, don’t give up.  Keep looking for the specialist who will listen to you and who can help you get rid of your jaw pain.

After the tooth or teeth were pulled, the people still had tooth pain.  The teeth were removed but the original cause of the pain wasn’t treated.

There is a strap-like muscle that attaches your lower jaw to your upper jaw.  It allows you to chew and clench your teeth.  It is called the massater.  There is one on each side of your face.

When the massater develops trigger points (hyper-irritable areas of muscle that cause pain) it feels like the pain is in your teeth!

If you have pain on the top and bottom teeth on one whole side of your mouth there is a very good chance that the massater muscle is to blame.

Here’s the treatment:

• Place your thumb on the inside of your cheek on the painful side.  Place your index finger on the outside of your cheek.  Reach toward your jaw joint with finger and thumb.
• When you clench your jaw you will feel the massater become hard or pop out if you are back far enough.  Relax your jaw and ‘pinch’ the massater between your thumb and index finger.
• Search around for tender areas.  Hold the pressure on the tender areas for about 12 seconds.  If an area doesn’t seem to be relaxing, it’s okay to leave it alone for a few minutes and go back to it later.
• Search the whole massater from back to front and from where to attaches to the lower jaw to the upper jaw.

Sometimes the massater is the only cause of your ‘tooth pain’.  Sometimes a few other muscles are involved and may be causing your jaw pain.  Those other muscles are in your neck on the same side and on the sides of your upper head.

The temporalis muscle on the sides of your head can also cause you to feel ‘tooth pain’ that really isn’t in your teeth.  It is a referral from a trigger point in that muscle.

A tooth infection can also cause trigger points in the massater.

But most often what feels like a tooth infection or painful cavity is actually the result of trigger points in your jaw muscles.

By doing this simple form of massage–pinching your jaw muscle and looking for tender points to hold–you may be able to get rid of the pain in your jaw and teeth naturally.

Where should your head be instead?  Well, when you were a toddler, it was pretty much directly over your body and that’s still where it should be.  Due to habits, furniture, car seats, work and life, sometimes our head moves out in front of us.  That causes a lot of symptoms and TMJ pain, or pain and difficulty moving your jaw, can be one of those symptoms.

If chewing has been painful for you…

or if it’s been hard to open or move your jaw…

or if it feels as though your jaw is dislocated…let’s talk about muscles and joints.

There are muscles all over your body and head including in and around your mouth.  There are muscles that let you open and close your jaw, which is a joint.  Two of these muscles are on each side of your TMJ (temporomandibular joint.)  They are called pterygoid muscles.  They are tucked in behind your lower jawbone.

When the pterygoid muscles get tight, or develop trigger points, they can cause difficulty opening your mouth.  They can also cause pain in the TMJ (jaw joint) area, difficulty breathing through your nose, ringing in your ears and “sinus” pain (but it’s really not a sinus issue.)  You can release, or relax, these muscles by pressing into them with your fingers.

There are two types of pterygoids.  Let’s call them “lower” and “upper.”

You can press up under your jaw bone with your thumb or finger, at the end of the jaw closest to your ear, and press into the “lower” pterygoid.  This might be very painful.  That’s a sign that you are in the right place.  The pressure from your finger causes the muscle to relax because it improves circulation.  You may be tender afterward if the spot is very painful, so take it easy on yourself.  (But don’t give up.)

The next muscle is the major cause of TMJ dysfunction and pain.  To get to the “upper” pterygoid, you need to reach into your mouth with a finger.  The muscle you are looking for is way in the back of your upper jaw, beyond your back teeth.  Push your finger back as far beyond the teeth as you can and then make tiny massaging movements with your finger tip in (toward your throat) and up (toward the top of your head.)  It will be very painful if these muscles are tight or have trigger points.

If it is very painful when you press on the spots, you know you have found a cause of your pain.

Of course, you need to have very short finger nails to do this work.  You must press deeply enough to determine whether these muscles are causing your TMJ issues.  Fortunately (or not?) the muscles in your mouth will be tender and that tells you whether they need to be released.

Even though you may have some tenderness, and it might take several sessions of self-treatment, you will see a decrease in your TMJ symptoms.  Use your body wisdom to determine how deeply and how often you should do this.  If you feel that you have bruising afterward from the pressure (typical when muscles are very tight), you can give your muscles a few days to get past the bruising before you treat them again.

And now I’d like to invite you to discover more ways to relieve your jaw pain naturally at http://JawPainNaturalRelief.com

You deserve to feel better all over and when you follow the advice in Jaw Pain Natural Relief your whole body will benefit and feel better.  And so will your jaw. You can get rid of your TMJ or pain in your jaw!

Did you know that there are muscles around the joint of your jaw that will cause these symptoms?  Let’s talk about those muscles and about that joint–the temporomandibular joint or TMJ.

If you have pain around your TMJ, you may have TMJD.  TMJD means dysfunction of the TMJ.  That means it doesn’t work as well as it should.

There are muscles inside your mouth, outside your mouth and in your cheeks that can be tight.  They can also be causing your TMJ issues.

I’m betting that if you press your finger all around your jaw area on the inside of your mouth where the soft tissues meet the bone (that is, upward from your upper teeth and downward from your lower teeth) you’ll find lots of very tender (or terribly tender) areas. Just press into them, or gently massage them, for several seconds, until they start to feel less tender. They will start to feel less tender because your muscles will start to relax, or release.

That’s what happens when we press into tight muscles–they relax.  (But only if they are the cause of pain.  If tender muscles are being caused by something else, rather than being the cause, they can’t relax with pressure.)

I remember well the first time I “released” my whole mouth; I could hardly close my jaw, because my face was so relaxed. Cheek muscles get “too tight” also. Place one finger outside and one inside a cheek; let the tips of the fingers touch; explore and press into any tight areas in the cheek muscles.

Of course, if you press or massage inside or outside your mouth, you’ll have to have no finger nails.  And, if you notice some tenderness afterward, that’s a natural response to pressing into “tight” muscles.

There are other ways to relax the muscles around your TMJ, too.  Here’s an easy little movement to help relax the muscles in the jaw area:  Pretend you are chewing while you hold your teeth apart and your lips closed.   I learned that from my friend, Christian.

By the way, some people find that actually chewing gum relaxes their jaws. For other people, chewing gum aggravates tight jaw muscles.

Since your jaw is attached to the rest of your body, your posture can also cause pain in your jaw. We’ll talk about that another time.

You deserve to feel better and you have a smart body that wants to be well. It just needs some help from you.  My friend Christian has put together a good program to help relieve your TMJ pain naturally at http://JawPainNaturalRelief.com Click on the link and see what he has to say.

What can cause your TMJ to stop moving smoothly?

• An injury or trauma that causes the joint to dislocate.
• Overuse of the powerful jaw muscles in certain positions.
• Sleeping always on the same side which may cause your jaw to “drop” to one side.
• Having a “forward head” posture which puts a lot of strain on your neck and jaw muscles.
• Dental work which mis-aligns your jaw by not lining up your teeth correctly.
• Scoliosis or curvature of the spine.

And, of course, there can be other causes but very often the cause turns out to be muscular.  Everything on the list, above, except for the dental work, involves your muscles.

So, if the powerful chewing muscles become tighter on one side than the other, they can “pull” your jaw out of alignment.

But how can you get your smooth movement back?

That’s the good news!  Muscles do get tight but they can be relaxed (released.)  If you can help those jaw muscles relax, your TMJ can usually move back into its neutral position where it moved smoothly.

According to my training, an interesting thing about the disk in the TMJ is that it can regenerate itself.  No other disk in the body can do that.  How cool!

If you have a jaw that “clicks” being able to relax the muscles around the joint can help it realign itself and may get rid of your click.  Sometimes you might need someone to help you correct your posture in order to eliminate the click.

In fact, your body is really smart and wants to be well.  Sometimes it just needs you to learn a little more so you can help it get out of pain.  But you can’t just learn–you also have to take action.

One way to take action is do-it-yourself.  I like the program my friend, Christian, put together to help you get rid of your TMJ pain.  You can learn more at Jaw Pain Natural Relief.com He understands how the whole body is involved when your jaw hurts.  (Why?  Because it’s all attached!)

Christian also developed very simple movements that you can do to help the muscles around your head, face, throat and neck relax.   When an area of your body lets go of tension, you will feel more relaxed all over.

The really good thing is that when all of those muscles are more in alignment and balanced, you will have fewer headaches, less neck pain–you’ll feel better in lots of ways.

Another way to take action is to find and go to a skilled massage therapist who can help you get rid of your TMJ pain.  Since muscles are usually the culprit, someone who can help those muscles release or relax can give you a lot of relief.  If your muscles are really, really tight, there may be some discomfort but if your therapist is well trained, you will benefit.

There are two actions you can take today.

• Make an appointment with a well-trained massage therapist or neuromuscular massage therapist.  Check out the “Massage” Category here at Simple Pain Relief for an article on how to find a massage therapist who can help you.
• Learn more about a do-it-yourself program at home.  For this I invite you to discover more at Jaw Pain Natural Relief.

You can learn how to stop suffering with TMJ pain and that’s a very good thing because you deserve to feel better!