Bruxism Symptoms and Diagnosis
In November 2015, I started experiencing an unexplained tinnitus (buzz sound) on my left side. It would come and go and change during certain times. By Feb 2016, the symptoms had become more severe and included pangs of masseter muscle deep jaw pain and facial muscle pain. I started making doctor’s appointments, saw a neurologist for an MRI, one ENT doctor, took blood samples but no diagnosis yet. Since the beginning I had been googling (researching) an explanation for those symptoms on the web. Many leads did not pan out but I read that night-time bruxism (unconscious grinding of teeth at night-time) could be a possible explanations.
Several key factors pointed in the direction of Bruxism:
I had been told before that I grind my teeth at night by my Dentist on my middle molars.
My symptoms started one month after the end of an orthodontic treatment Invisalign which is a transparent plastic mold designed to keep your teeth in place.
Very quickly after starting to wear the Invisalign appliance, it started to show wear marks at the points of contact of my teeth and I innocently bit hard getting thru the pain of my teeth changing shape.
I made an appointment with another dentist who made a special mouth guard designed to fit on the front teeth only. This had a positive impact on my symptoms and two months after wearing that, I believed the problem was kinda gone.
However I still ha had intermittent tinnitus. In June of 2016, I had stated having semi-permanent tension headaches again. This time, I experienced pain when chewing which clearly pointed to an issue with the jaw and especially jaw muscles. In March 2017, I went to see a dentist for TruDenta and DTR in attempt to remediate a malocclusion problem. This had a beneficial impact. The dentist mentioned that night-time bruxism is extremely challenging to control, that it mat. y be caused by stress, but may become habitual and persist even after the stress stimulus is removed. But no feedback or CBT yet.
Clench Data
In September 2017, I purchased the Head Band device which detects night-time bruxism and attempts to condition you out of it by triggering a whisper of an electric tone. It’s a very well made very compact device which you wear at night around head. Beware, it looks silly.
The headband device was the thing that helped me the most up to that point. It would give me some metrics of how many times I ground my teeth at night. It started out at 140/night, then progressively moved to 30/night. My symptoms improved radically. However by December 2017 the number of grinds/night started increasing, to 120/night, 180/night and even as high as 220/night , as if my body had somehow adjusted and no longer cared about the quiet whisper tone. (that’s a joke because I couldn’t hear it over my tinnitus)
The idea started forming in my head that the device should not just send an electric shock, but actually wake me up if bruxism is detected.
The data help me also realize it was getting worse.
It’s at this point In early 2018 is when I started experimenting with myself for solutions.
Thanks for reading - Ryan