#182 You Can’t Treat TMD Correctly Until You Understand What Causes the Disease

What would you think about a PCP who told you diabetes was caused by eating too much sugar rather than a problem with the amount of insulin secreted by the pancreas. Or how about an ophthalmologist who told you the need to change your prescription was because you squint too much when you read. What about the dentist who told you that your tooth decay is caused by little worms that get inside the tooth like people were told centuries ago.  I think you’d conclude these doctors didn’t understand the disease and hopefully you’d be looking for a doctor that did. 

Well, in 2026 that is the exact position you are faced with if you have Temporomandibular Joint Disorder, (TMD), most often called “TMJ”, the name of the joint itself, (Temporomandibular Joint).  Would you go to an Orthopedic Surgeon with knee pain and announce you have a case of knees.  That is exactly where we are in the 21st century regarding the general level of knowledge that dentists carry about TMD.   

Not only don’t dentists and the public at large know what to call the disease, the dental profession doesn’t know what causes the disparate and confusing set of symptoms.  The studies and dental investigators still profess that the multiple symptoms are the result of multiple diseases rather than a single universal cause.  So rather than figure out a way to treat the cause, they end up trying to trat the symptoms created by the cause.  This leaves them treating TMD patients with a series of ineffective substitutes like drugs that numb the pain or suppress the entire nervous system along with multiple unpleasant and dangerous side effects, Botulinum Toxin A (Botox) that paralyzes muscles but does not address the symptoms that move to other parts of the head, face, neck and body,  and psychological/psychiatric treatments that attempt to talk a person, our drug a person out of their anxiety about their life circumstances.  There are many other recommendations and treatment modalities for TMD that make no sense when you understand the cause of the disease. 

The most interesting feature of the problem is that individual dentists and the profession as a whole, do not want to hear about the actual cause because it invalidates the personal and institutional biases which they rely upon to support decades of ineffective recommendations and treatments.  Do you think the medieval dental barber had anything good to say about his fellow dentist who professed to control dental decay by using a toothbrush to remove dental plague rather than removing the entire tooth and all the dental worms within.  There are multiple examples of this type of narrow-minded defense of undefendable positions throughout the medical, dental and scientific establishments.  Authorities at the time even put Galileo Galilei, (1564-1642) under house arrest for the remainder of his life because he professed and wrote upon the fact that the earth revolved around the sun, rather than the earth being the center of the universe. It took until 1992 for the Catholic Church to admit and apologize for their travesty. 

The truth is the disparate symptoms of TMD, including headache, earache, neck pain, upper back and shoulder pain, tinnitus, subjective hearing loss, vertigo, arm/hand/finger tingling and numbness, and various kinds of jaw locking are directly caused by chronic inflammation within the Temporomandibular Joint.  When you unload the temporomandibular Joint by using a simple oral device and protocol, (Urbanek Device and Protocol) you create the same effect as crutches for knee pain and a sling for Tennis Elbow diminishing the chronic inflammation thus diminishing the symptoms.  

It’s not rocket science.  Orthopedic surgeons figured this out decades ago, and it took Dr. Tony Urbanek, reading the science already available, to successfully apply it to the treatment of TMD. 

           Blog Article, “TMD Demystified #182”, Published, April 26, 2026