What Is TMD Exactly?
The best definition of TMD is a broad one: TMD disorder is a condition involving pain or tenderness in the muscles and/or joint that control jaw movement, with the pain sometimes referring beyond these areas. This pain includes jaw pain, jaw popping or clicking, or pain in the face, eyes, neck, head, and pain when you chew or open wide.
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Many MDs don’t fully understand the disorder. Many dentists can identify TMD, but have not been trained to treat it.
The TMJ (temperomandibular joint) is in a class of its own since it’s both a hinging and a sliding joint. This is unique and accounts for the circular movement that is required to properly chew food. There is no other joint in the body like it. This movement allows the teeth to come together like a mortar and pestle does and efficiently initiates the beginning of the proper digestion of food.
You may not have noticed this before, but when you chew, you chew in a circular motion — not just up and down — and that’s thanks to the translational movement of the temperomandibular joint. That circular chewing motion, I think, may have evolved to help humans digest our food better and give us more variation in spoken voice. It’s not a simple hinging movement, it’s more of a three dimensional (circular) movement, and because of that complexity, it can lead to problems or misalignment
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