Hi Everyone and welcome or welcome back to my YouTube channel! My name is Priya Mistry and I'm
a General Dentist with the practice in beautiful Portland, Oregon. hHere at our practice, we are
dedicated to taking care of patients with TMJ Disorders. Please check out my Instagram page if
you haven't - I have the handle right here on this page! I post when my videos upload and just little
tips or tricks to help take care of your TMJ pain. Today's video is about ear-related concerns
so if you or someone you know suffers with ear related concerns,
it could be either an ear infection or it could be TMJ related. So getting checked out by an ENT
is always a good first step to make sure that it's not an ear infection. So if an ENT rules that out,
then it's most likely associated with a TMJ related problem. The complaints that we hear
most often related to the ears: our number one - stuffy ears! So patients will come in and they say
I feel like I've been on an airplane and I need to pop my ears, or they just feel really full
or congested. Another thing that we hear commonly is vertigo or dizziness that comes and goes;
and third we hear ear pain - and this can be sharp, lancing ear pains.
I've had someone say it feels like I'm being stabbed in my ear or someone's taking an ice
pick to it; so that does not sound very pleasant. I've also heard it described as a more of a dull
ache, so it's not that sharp, stabbing pain but even those with the dull pain can have moments
of that sharp, stabbing pain. So those are kind of the main things that we hear about with the ears.
So i want to go through and explain each of them. Let's start with the stuffy ears - or the feeling
that the ears are really full or congested. This is typically because of muscular dysfunction
in the muscles that surround and support the eustachian tube. These muscles are called the
Tensor Tympani and the Levator Veli Palatini - really fancy names for muscles that surround and
support the eustachian tube. The eustachian tube - one of its functions is to actually
equalize the air pressure between the middle ear and the outer ear by opening intermittently.
If or when these muscles that surround and support that eustachian tube become dysfunctional (those
muscles with the fancy names that I mentioned) it can then put pressure on that eustachian tube
and it can cause it to just sort of dysfunction. And so then the ears start to feel full.
They start to feel like you need to pop; them they start to feel congested, and that's typically what
causes that feeling. So if we can get those muscles calmed down, we can get that feeling
to go away and typically we can do that pretty quickly. So let's move on to explaining vertigo.
To explain the vertigo, I want to sort of refer to osteopathic principles. So osteopathic doctors are
doctors that study hands-on manipulation, and they understand that the body functions as a whole.
The jawbone with the mandible here, which is the lower part of the TMJ joint,
literally is suspended in a sling of muscle and because of that it is highly responsive
to postural changes. The temporal bones, which are the upper part of the jaw joints,
literally house the semicircular canals which are in charge of balance. So if this unit is
dysfunctional - if the muscles are dysfunctional, if the joints are dysfunctional - it can lead to
vertigo and dizziness. And lastly, we will go over causes of ear pain - that sharp lancing pain in
the ear or the dull achiness in the ear that's not from an ear infection. So this is explained
by two structures; one of these structures is the Discomalleolar Ligament. The Discomalleolar
Ligament is an actual anatomical, a physical connection between the joint and the middle ear.
So this ligament attaches to the articular disc - which is in the TMJ, inside the joint - and
it goes from there to the middle ear. So if that ligament gets stretched or strained, if that disc
becomes dislocated, or there's muscle dysfunction and that ligament gets stretched or strained,
we believe that that's what causes some of that lancing pain or even the dull pain within the ear.
And then the other reason for that pain in the ear is referred pain from "the Troublemaker"
muscle - the Lateral Pterygoid muscle. So the Lateral Pterygoid muscle is one that I talk about
a lot, because it attaches to the disc itself within the joint and it has fibers that run behind
the eye and just kind of all over; and it can definitely refer pain into the ear as well. So all
of this information will beg the question: how do we treat this we treat this? We treat this at our
office with custom-made orthotics, manual therapy, and myofascial release. So we measure where the
muscles are the most relaxed and where the joints are nice and aligned, and we build orthotics to
that position. Along with that, we do our own manual therapy and we do myofascial release
and this works really, really well; and we can usually get rid of the stuffy ears ,the vertigo,
and the ear pain within three weeks. So we have a good success rate. Having said that, this pain
can come back in times of stress. In times of stress, we all clench and grind our teeth more.
Even if we're not really fully aware of it, we're probably doing it when we sleep at night.
So it can come back and people will have flare-ups here and there, but it typically never goes back
to how it originally was, so they're better than the baseline. And the flare-ups will occur over
stressful periods of which people have had many this year; it's been a bit of a stressful year!
So my friends, I hope that clears up ear-related symptoms because I see a lot of questions about
that. I get a lot of questions about that! I'm part of this amazing Facebook TMJ support group,
where they're posting a lot of questions about ear-related concerns. So that encouraged me to
make a video trying to explain all of those. So if you liked what you heard, if you learned
something - please click "Like" below, Subscribe to my channel, do all the things. I'm trying to
increase awareness about this condition, so that we can all work together to help more people!
So if you guys have any video requests, any comments, any questions - please comment
below. I'm always happy to answer! Reach out to me; I'm here for you guys and thank you!