Stay away from TMD! [SPLINTEMBER] – PDP039

Why do some patients have painful joints, whereas others get headaches? And why do MOST of our parafunctional patients not get any symptoms at all? Why do some peoples teeth wear away, whilst others teeth are riddled in cracks? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amdss07uN9s Need to Read it? Check out the Full Episode Transcript below! In this episode, I talk about the pros and cons of devoting your career in Dentistry to treating Temporomandibular disorders. Treating 'TMD' can be a complex field because it deals with all the complexities of chronic pain. However, it can be a very rewarding area. I also discussed why the umbrella term of 'TMD' is not really specific enough. We can do better as a profession to understand the diagnoses within 'TMD' a little better. Protrusive Dental Pearl: check out the Otter app for transcribing your voice, lectures or any audio/video! This is great for anyone who wants to convert audio in to notes, for students, and for content creators. I have uploaded the Diagnostic Criteria for Temporomandibular Disorders (DC/TMD) PDF file on to the Protrusive Dental Community group as promised to the listeners. If you enjoyed this episode, check out Myth Busting Occlusion and TMD with Dr Barry Glassman. Click here for Full Episode Transcription: Opening Snippet: Hey, I mean it. Stay away from TMD. Hello everyone and welcome to the second episode of splintember this one's called stay away from TMD. Now it's an interesting title and I appreciate that and I really really gave it a lot of thought before I came to this title because I wanted to take Splintember in a certain direction. Jaz’s Introduction:Now if I dived straight into talking about different appliances, different splints without first covering the context of the temporomandibular joint anatomy, the muscles the teeth and there I even say the occlusion and the role that has in it probably lacked a lot of direction and context right? So I’m going to go back to basics. I'm going to talk about anatomy and its relevance to the different so-called temporomandibular disorders that we see and hopefully that will tie in with the future episodes and you can sort of follow along in a more logical manner. So that’s what this is about.So the reason I pick the title stay away from tmd is because I genuinely mean it like, stay away. Do you really want to get involved in tmd patients unless you genuinely have a passion for it and you have a genuine passion for treating chronic pain now it’s a serious question because it is something that you need to be waking up on Monday morning going to work and you gotta say to yourself okay today I’m excited to go into work today to see my six patients who all have severe chronic pain and they’ve been going from one specialist clinic to another specialist clinic and they’re finally going to see me and I’ll solve all their problems. This is really complex dentistry and it’s very niche density so that’s what I mean by chronic pain and tmd. Do you really want a practice built around thatAnd of course don’t take my word for it if it’s something you generally want to do then that’s totally cool but what I found is that I molded my practice and the type of care that I provide I don’t advertise on my patient-facing website or in any sort of public-facing YouTube sort of content I make for patients that I like to treat tmd or that sort of stuff it’s something that I don’t advertise myself because I don’t want to be swamped with these patients because they are challenging and complex a lot of these patients are chronic pain patients which is a whole different field. In fact a member of the public or a prospective patient actually commented on the first splintember episode on my YouTube channel and she commented saying ‘hey I’m not a dentist but I’d like to know are you going to be covering the treatment of an anteriorly displaced disc?’ So I sort of said no I’m not going to be covering this it...