Using Tekscan During TMJ Treatment

I'm not just the dentist, I'm a patient. I was hit by a drunk driver at 16 head-on and it messed up my jaw and I had a couple of motocross accidents, and so I started grinding my teeth and my joints started hurting. So throughout dental school, throughout the first years of my practice I'm like, "What can I do?" I tried every night guard out there. I tried every modality out there so I'm well-versed on the options. I love to use something called the Tekscan which is a digital reproduction of your bite and if there's an issue, sometimes there's a vector that is just off and it's something we can't tell with just a piece of paper like a normal dentist. A typical dentist would just check with a paper, but with a computer video it actually makes a movie of the way you chew. We can find interferences that way. And then the mouth guard that works the best for me is called the NTI. It's very small, it's not big. It's made out of Lexan which is the bulletproof glass material so it doesn't break, and it can create just a very relaxing therapeutic effect. And then if we've tried all those different modalities there are other levels we can go to, but those are the first two steps to avoid TMJ getting to be debilitating. A lot of people don't realize that migraines can be caused by their TMJ or a misalignment in their mouth. I have a wonderful patient who was on permanent disability with being a bus driver and she was on Imitrex. She had horrible nausea and headaches from her migraines. We got her in the NTI and within three days she was off her Imitrex. Within three weeks she was back to work full-time. That was awesome.