Indications for Acute Injury

According to the American Dental Association website, 33 percent of the U.S. population has or has had TMJ disorder. That is an indication for acute injuries and it is essential to find out if the patient needs to be treated long term.

DR. STEVEN OLMOS: The American Dental Association's website lets us know that 33% of the U.S. population has or has had a TM disorder. And so, therefore, acute flare ups of TMJ or oral facial pain can happen quite frequently in anyone's practice. Whether or not we need to treat that patient in a long term way, it's essential to find this out as soon as possible, and of course, we have the patient in the acute injury state of a macrotrauma. That means acute injury to the mandible or head. It could be playing volleyball, a ball hitting you, a motor vehicle accident, any kind of acceleration/deceleration trauma produces inflammation in the joint that needs to be decompressed, and of course, our recommended guidelines are decompression of the joint and NSAIDs for a two week period of time and reevaluation at that point. This is where the Aqualizer is invaluable. We could have a patient, after some kind of macrotrauma that has the inability to be able to open their mouth. It may be because of muscular contraction. It could be because of displacement, and our thought process is that we'd like to get something into the mouth that would decompress, but it'd certainly be difficult to take compressions or fabricate any type of appliances. Well, that's the beauty of the Aqualizer. It will allow us to insert, with minimal opening, decompress without any pathologic relationships, and allow either structures to reproduce themselves, like the disk relocating itself, or just decompressing the inflammation, stopping the pain to the brain, so that the muscles now can relax. In either situation, it will be a good diagnostic tool to let the clinician know whether or not chronic treatment or chronic presentation of treatment, and therefore, more definitive care will be necessary, or whether or not that resolves the problem, and the patient is free of any further treatment. Also, in the presentation of a chronic, ongoing problem of maybe subclinical symptomology, but then, an acute flare up, well, again, decompression will allow the clinician to be able to discern whether it's time to actually begin definitive treatment for that TM, or whether or not this patient just needed some decompression for a short period of time, in order to restore themselves back to this subclinical level of symptomology.