Can My Neck Also Be Causing My Jaw Pain?

Your neck may be the cause of your jaw pain. We don’t always connect the dots on this one, but the fact is, basically everything in the body is connected. It’s easy to think of the neck spine connected to the back because it’s a series of vertebrae or spinal bones stacked on one another.

In this case, your cranium or skull connects to the top of the spine, the jaw connects to the head. We call this the TMJ or temperomandibular joint. The temporal bone and the mandible (lower jaw bone) join to form your TMJ.

When we shift the neck it will shift the head, therefore this joint will be altered. The way the muscles lay will be altered too. Just like any other area of the body, like our upper back and neck, imbalances in the muscles will pull a bone out of place too. As a matter of fact, if you have jaw pain, feel around your TMJ (you can feel it on the side of your cheek when you open and close the mouth), I betcha there are tight and tender spots in the muscle. You will also have tight spots in the neck, guaranteed.

Putting your cervical spine in correct alignment will help balance the muscles and align your jaw also. Massaging the muscles of the jaw will help quite a bit, but the problem will often return until you work on your neck.


Visit Arc4life.com for your online selection of cervical support neck pillows, orthopedic pain relief products and Home traction units. Products for pain relief. Bookmark this on Delicious Stumble It!

Staying Healthy: What Can I Do?

There are a number of things we can do to stay healthy. Here's what I call the big 4:

1. Eating right - try to eat on the more natural side. One big tip is that if you pick up something at the store and the ingredient list literally wraps around the whole package that's not a good sign. The less presservatives, fillers, and junk the better. Drink lots of water and supplement as well.
   
   
2. Get adequate rest - Make you bedroom as sleep conducive as possible, avoid eating and drinking soon before bed, and use the traction neck pillow. Everyone is a little different but most of us need somewhere around seven hours.
   
   
3. Exercise - this is also important, exercise gets you to sweat, it gets blood flowing, and it forces you to breathe more. Remember oxygen is fuel to our brain. It also forces you to use muscles, and I find we tend to stretch more and take care of our self more.
   
   
4. Be aware of stress - this eats away at us mentally and eventually physically too. Also, stress isn't just mental. By doing the other three things I noted you can avoid physical stressors too. For example not drinking enough water can basically stress body tissue and organs.
   

Do your best to have and do the above list because if one of these items is missing your health will suffer. Visit Arc4life.com for your online selection of cervical support neck pillows, orthopedic pain relief products and Home traction units. Products for pain relief. Bookmark this on Delicious Stumble It!

Ouch! I knew I screwed up my neck!

Could your episode of neck pain been avoided? Probably, right! Now we've got neck pain, how can we get pain relief?

If it's severe pain use ice to decrease the neck pain and inflammation. 20 minutes on and 20 minutes off works best, and try to do this a few times during the day or night.

Also use muscle massage and any topical pain relief gels like biofreeze are good to have around.

The best thing to do is prevent a neck pain episode from happening in the first place. So next time you know something may strain your neck, try to avoid it. Sometimes this is impossible however. So the next best thing is to have neck pain relief products on hand.

Some of my top picks are as follows:

1. the cervical traction neck pillow
   
2. ice and heat packs
   
3. the back nobber
   
4. a tens unit
   

Visit Arc4life.com for your online selection of cervical support neck pillows, orthopedic pain relief products and Home traction units. Products for pain relief. Bookmark this on Delicious Stumble It!