Covid, Headaches & Teeth – Are They Related?

Hi, there. I’m Dr. Mounts. I wanted to visit with you a little bit about something that I’ve been seeing a lot of lately, and that is people coming in with headaches and earaches.

Now you may wonder why people are coming to the dental office with headaches or earaches? Surprisingly enough a lot of these folks have either been to their physicians or to an ear, nose, and throat doctor, trying to figure out where their problems are coming from, and those folks aren’t finding any issues at all that go to the ear, nose and throat, and their ears are clean, but they’re having pain coming up from around their ears.

And it turns out that the problem that they’re having is TMJ issues. And I know it’s something that we’ve talked about a little bit before, but I just want to let you know, because I think the reason we’re seeing so many cases come in now is that people are just stressed, and I’m sure you’d have a really hard time trying to figure out why people are stressed these days. But certainly as we’ve come through this full year of COVID now, we have seen a really big increase in the number of folks who are dealing with TMJ problems.

Our bodies handle stress in different ways, but one of the ways that we deal with stress is by clenching and grinding our teeth. Now, I’m not really sure why we do that, but there are so many people that do it. And I’m one of those folks. But as the stress levels go up, and the clenching and grinding increases, it really causes problems with the whole system. It can cause problems with the muscles that do all the clenching for us. It can cause problems with the joint. You can get a lot of inflammation in there, which is what gives you the pain up around your ears as well, and as well as the headaches too.

So if these are things that you’ve been noticing, especially here in the last year, you feel like you could possibly be clenching or grinding your teeth, give us a call. Come in and see us and maybe we could check things out, see if that might be part of your problem. There are a few fairly easy solutions for that to kind of help slow things down, get those muscles feeling better, get the joints feeling better. So if you think that might be your case, give us a call. Our number is a (501) 753-0166.