A well-known painful condition that is diagnosed based upon a history of shooting pain along a branch of the trigeminal nerve (V), precipitated by touching a trigger zone. The most commonly accepted etiology of TN among healthcare providers is vascular compression and demyelination of some aspect of the trigeminal nerve. No other explanation has been offered within the literature despite that 90% of the cases remain idiopathic in nature.
Published in Chapter:
Complex Medical Diagnoses With an Underlying Dental Etiology: Case Reviews
Ben A. Sutter, DMD (Private Practice, USA)
Copyright: © 2020
|Pages: 73
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-5225-9254-9.ch018
Abstract
The aim of this chapter is to present a series of chronic pain clinical cases that were originally diagnosed by non-dental healthcare professionals, as being something other than temporomandibular disorders (TMD). Specifically, the individual patient diagnoses were Phantom Bite Syndrome (PB), Meniere's Disease (MD), Cervical Dystonia (CD), and Trigeminal Neuralgia (TN), where the prior treatments rendered to each patient that were based upon these diagnoses, were all unsuccessful. Each patient was then re-evaluated with a series of biometric occlusal measurement technologies, which included the T-Scan 9/BioEMG III synchronization module. This two-function synchronized system was utilized in the re-diagnosis of each patient, as well as during their rendered occlusal treatment, in evaluating the accuracy of the treatment results, and during each patient's post-treatment maintenance. The four patients were treated with disclusion time reduction (DTR), after which each patient's symptoms either greatly improved, or resolved completely. The observations made in this chapter are highly suggestive that TMD can present as one of these alternative diagnoses, or that TMD was their original problem condition that was misdiagnosed, absent the objective occlusal force and timing data offered by the T-Scan 9 system.