Headaches are a very broad category of problems and include dozens of potential causes. Dental causes of head, neck or facial pain could include cavities, abscessed teeth, gum infection, cysts, tumors of the jaw bones or swollen glands, broken or cracked teeth and TMJ dysfunction syndrome.

Your bite has probably been off for quite some time. What has recently changed was your ability to tolerate it. In other words, your brain has always known that there is a disharmony between your teeth and jaw joints, but it has chosen not to be bothered by it until recently. It may be due to the fact that you are experiencing more stress lately. It may be due to fatigue or any of the factors that I’ve discussed in this book. Sooner or later, most people will react to a tooth jaw discrepancy with the erasure pattern of tooth grinding or clenching.

Unfortunately, your last dentist may not have looked at your bite and its relationship to your jaw joints. They may have given your bite a cursory look and pronounced it okay, but that is not the same thing as helping you get your jaw centered and then checking to see if your teeth line up in harmony with the joints. If closing your teeth together forces the jaw joints off-center, you have physical evidence of conflict between the teeth and the jaw joints.

No, absolutely not. This can be proven by the fact that many patients who have been treated successfully did not have their symptoms return, even though their lives appeared to become more stressful after treatment. Stress will make you less tolerant of whatever degree of unevenness there is in your bite, but once the bite is properly treated, the problems almost always go away.