Yoga and Your Well-Being: Health and Happiness

The wisdom of this article will likely be lost on many Americans who have the type of chronic pain problems that this writer has addressed. Many would rather believe that popping anti-inflammatories, taking cortizone shots, and having jaw, wrist, neck, and back surgeries are the answer. Their doctor has likely been trained to handle TMJ/TMD, repetitive stress injuries, and bulging disks by treating the symptom instead of the cause.

I was one of the lucky ones. I had had severe TMJ (jaw) pain over a period of about 7 years. I was taking an anti-inflammatory drug daily. It was not relieving my pain. I didn't know where to turn. I started seeing specialists. I eventually drove 10 hours to one of this country's top superclinics. There, an oral surgeon told me that I would need open-joint surgery to my jaw joint in 6 months to 2 years, depending on my pain tolerance. Since that surgery was going to leave me with a 2-inch scar in front of my ear, I was reluctant. Plus, my parents knew someone in our neighborhood who had had that same surgery, ironically at that same superclinic, and was in more pain after her surgery than before. I took my parents' advice. I got a second opinion. I didn't know where to go. I just pulled the name of another oral surgeon out of a local phone book. Someone must have been looking out for me that day. This oral surgeon was different. He looked at my MRI and tomogram from the superclinic and said that although they had indicated my jaw disc was likely perforated, he personally felt there was probably a 50% chance that my problem was just muscular. He told me in confidence that many of the open joint surgeries done for TMJ/TMD--the same ones that he himself was doing--fail. He suggested that I stop taking the anti-inflammatory drug that I was taking and see a craniopath he knew who had been having great success in the treatment of TMJ/TMD using a purely palpatory neuromuscular approach.

Although I had a big question mark over my head of whether this would be worth my time, I took his advice. I had to drive two hours each way to see the craniopath. I saw him weekly, then eventually bi-weekly, over 6 months in 1992. His treatment was painless, took about 20 minutes, and cost $40 a session. The first week, I was amazed. I'd drive over their in pain and drive home pain free. It was as if the last 7 years of pain had never happened. But at first, the pain relief lasted only a day or two. But, as he predicted, after weeks of treatment, it started to hold. After six months, I stopped going. I never had the surgery recommended by the superclinic. And I never had pain in my jaw again. Around the same time, I also taught myself to stop tensing up the muscles in my jaw and to stop grinding my teeth at night. It took a few months, but I remember that I used to say over and over again, before I went to bed, stuff like "I will keep my jaw relaxed tonight, I will not grind my teeth tonight, etc.".

While I was seeing this craniopath, he explained to me that what he was doing was helping to restore good muscle tone that I had lost. He said that sometimes people, when they are stressed, develop a habit of tensing up one or more parts of his body, 24x7, to the point that circulation is reduced and oxygen to tissues is cut off (ouch!). For example, a person might do this in their neck and shoulders, eventually causing pain in the wrists and fingers. Or to the muscles in the lower back, causing lower back pain.. After years of this abuse, the muscle gets “locked up” (his term). The muscle has lost tone, the joints don't work the same, and cartilage has worn down. (He said that eventually this can get to the point where it’s down to bone against bone, and that at that point, there’s little that even a good neuromuscular specialist can do other than relieve pain temporarily.) In my case, he was able to restore good oxygenation, circulation, and muscle tone, and I became asymptomatic again.

I have told this story many times to people I meet who have told me about their chronic pain problems. I think that most don't believe that the solution to chronic joint pain can sometimes be this simple. They’d rather take the anti-inflammatories, have the cortizone shots, and get the jaw, neck, wrist, and back surgeries instead of getting a second opinion from someone who believes in treating the cause rather than the symptom.

Last winter my dad was in inpatient rehab for about a week. While our family was there, I got to talking with one of the occupational therapists. She said I wouldn’t believe her if she told me how many of her patients are there to get help for a chronic pain problem made worse by a surgery that was supposed to treat it. She also told me that what people need to ask a surgeon, before having an elective surgery for chronic pain, is what his success rate is; NOT the percentage of surgeries he’s done that were done correctly procedural wise (that’s the number he may try to give), but instead the percentage of patients he has operated on who, after his surgery, have had long-term relief of their painful symptoms.

Best wishes,