Imagine you do an exam and find the muscles on the right half of a person won’t relax when they are supposed to relax. In essence, they are too tight. The left side of the body works just fine. The muscles contract when they are supposed to and relax appropriately when they are supposed to.
What would you do in this situation?
Rub the muscles to try to get them to loosen up? That would be the most common solution. It must be a muscle problem right? If you work the knots and tightness out you should fix the problem.
I don’t buy that thought process.
After all, muscles don’t do anything by themselves. They are told what to do. They are being controlled. So in this case, why were only the right sided muscles being told to not relax?
As the title of this post suggests, I found the culprit was a tooth that wasn’t moving how it was supposed to. Yes, teeth need to move, they aren’t just shoved into the bone like little pegs.
In fact, teeth are very important to how our brains operate.
The nerve sensors connected to teeth give the brain critical feedback. Large amounts of nerves travel to and from the teeth. Much more proportion wise than your knee, your ankle and other body parts.
Your teeth are important.
We have all had the great privilege of biting on something hard unexpectedly. The ENTIRE BODY reacts when this happens.
Our bodies twist and contort all the way down to our toes to try to pull away from the insult and protect our teeth. It isn’t just a movement of the jaw, it’s a whole body event.
It’s not a stretch to make the connection with a tooth to hip and leg pain even though it’s seemingly quite far away.
In this patient, the tooth in question was on her right upper jaw. This is consistent when I find this problem. It will be on the same side as the problems in the body.
My patients tooth had a root canal and crown put on it just a few weeks before. And yes, my patient starting having problems with her right leg shortly after this root canal. She was having pain and stiffness in her right groin and hip socket.
When I was doing my exam and pressing on her hip she was in pain. She said it felt like little needles.
I checked numerous things that might be the problem and found nothing. Based off past experience I knew to start looking in the head and mouth. Whenever I find strange problems the culprit is almost always in the head.
I found I needed to pull the tooth out of the socket [it had been jammed into the socket]. Sometimes I need to move them side to side, sometimes they need to be pushed up into the socket.
After my 30 second treatment I rechecked all the muscles and they were working perfectly. I could also push on her hip socket and she felt no pain or needle sensation.
Another interesting finding was when she stood up she was extremely dizzy for 10 seconds or so.
This is a common finding after I work on the cranial system [the teeth are a part of this system]. It seems the brain starts to get more oxygen and therefore people temporarily get light headed just as if you were to breathe really fast and hyperventilate.
The cerebrospinal fluid [vital fluid around the brain and spinal cord] can flow unimpeded.
So, if you have tight muscles it’s because your brain is telling them to be tight. Something, somewhere is interfering with the normal operation of the body.