Did you know that Botox can be an effective treatment for chronic pain conditions like TMJ, chronic migraines and tension headaches?
What is TMJ?
Let’s first talk about TMJ. When muscles in the jaw and face become tense due to stress, anxiety, or other factors, it can lead to symptoms such as jaw pain, difficulty chewing, clicking or popping noises in the jaw joint (TemporoMandibular Joint or TMJ), headaches, earaches, and even limited jaw movement. These symptoms are commonly associated with TMJ disorders. Muscle pain from the TMJ can also be caused by a misaligned bite, or teeth clenching during the day or night. In addition to understanding and addressing these root causes, helping alleviate the tight muscles is an important part of recovery.
Chronic headaches can be associated with TMJ issues, but are often unrelated and can be caused by tight and inflamed muscles in the neck and shoulders and forehead. Myofascial pain syndrome is a disorder in which pressure on sensitive points in the muscles causes pain and often happens after injury or muscle overuse. It’s possible that tension in your neck, and the muscles around your skull (occiput and temporal muscles for example) are the underlying cause of your chronic headaches.
Botox is an excellent way of breaking the cycle of pain. While it’s important to get to the root cause of the underlying stress, anxiety, and tension and rule out other causes of headaches like Lyme or other tick infections, toxin overload, mold exposure, structural imbalances and more (all of which we also focus on at Blum Center for Health), sometimes you want to feel better right now. Preventing muscle contraction with Botox is an evidence based approach to alleviating pain and one way to do this.
Botox works by temporarily paralyzing or weakening the muscles that are in spasm and causing pain. In the case of headaches, it can be injected into specific muscles in the head and neck to release the tension, and prevent them from again contracting excessively. This can alleviate tension and reduce the frequency and severity of your headaches.
The procedure, depending on the location of your symptoms, involves multiple injections around the head and neck and/or jaw. Because there are multiple injections into areas of trigger points, a common initial side effect can be soreness, which usually resolves within a day or two.
Clinical trials have shown that Botox injections can be an effective treatment reducing the number of headache days per month for many patients and alleviating jaw pain and grinding. Because botox takes up to 2-3 weeks to take effect, it may take up to a month to start seeing the effects.
IS BOTOX FOR TMJ FOR ME?
If you suffer from any of these….
- chronic headaches, or
- have chronic pain in your jaw or TMJ
- Have chronic muscular pain in your head and neck
….and if you’ve seen many specialists and tried other options to no avail, then Botox might finally give you the relief you are searching for.
WANT TO LEARN MORE ABOUT BOTOX AND TMJ?
While we don’t accept insurance, we will provide you with a form to submit to your insurance company.
Botox injections will give you temporary relief from your pain – which is important! If you’re interested in discovering the root cause of your headaches and how Functional Medicine can help, schedule an appointment with our clinicians for an in-depth medical assessment. 914.652.7800