Chiropractics

My chiropractor - B. M. - was doing everything he could to help me. He is by far the sweetest and most dedicated practitioner I have encountered during my TMJ journey. I owe him a lot.

B. M. proposed a twelve-treatment plan to begin with. According to my response to this treatment, he would either continue with it or refer me to a more experienced chiropractor in cranial disorders, with whom he was already discussing my difficult case. My treatments would have a short time gap between them, so that my body would be on constant "pressure" to heal. I would visit the clinic every Monday, Wednesday and Friday for the following weeks.

The first thing to do was to stabilise my pelvis, increase my general core strength and release some of the tension on the right side of my body. This stage went relatively well and took only a couple of treatments. The aim was to concentrate my pain around the right TMJ, instead of having it affecting the entire right side of my head, neck, right shoulder and back. This goal was partially accomplished - I noticed a considerable reduction of the pain on my shoulder and back, but from the neck upwards it remained the same. There was this really really annoying thing on my neck posture that was making things extremely difficult for the treatment to be effective.

Alternatives?

Davide and I spent hours and hours, days in a row, searching for anything that would reduce my TMJ pain, an alternative to the excessive use of drugs. An alternative that could give us back a little of our life prior to the arthrocentesis - no pain, no medication side-effects, no frustrations. And especially, an alternative that would allow me to follow my dream (the IODP scientific cruise in Japan) and grab the opportunities that I had been offered recently (summer internship in Norway). We found a chiropractic clinic close to where we live, offering acute and chronic pain relief through the use of neurostimulation technology (InterX therapy). We arranged an appointment for the following week (January 31st, 2012), hoping the chiropractor B. M. would be able to help me.

Usually in B. M.'s clinic, the initial consultation and examination (including X-rays) is one hour long, followed by a second appointment where the findings are reported, and a treatment plan is proposed. However, my initial consultation took almost two hours, and I still had to go back to the clinic on the following day for more physical examinations and X-rays. I was not the first patient with TMJ disorder that B. M. had seen, but I was definitely his worst case.