Atypical Facial pain/ Atypical Odontalgia/ Atypical TN

Hi everyone! First time posting!

back in November I had a crown replaced and was in pain immediately after. I ended up doing a root canal a week later. All was well for 4 weeks.

the tooth got sensitive when tapped. Then it got painful. Then within a week I developed pins and needles crawling feeling on my same side of my face on cheek/jaw/chin.

over the last 7 months it has gotta worse. Spread to the other side of my mouth and other root canaled teeth, implant, other fillings.

I’m really so scared. Scared that it’s actual damage from the injection, or just that it won’t ever go away. Nicknamed the suicide disease and I will have to get dental work in the future I’m sure. I left the fb groups discussing the condition but man it was hopeless to hear people struggling for years to decades.

curious if anyone else has dealt with this? I did go to the neurologist who gave me the diagnosis (after all X-rays, CBCT scans came back clear). Diagnosed as a nerve issue. It’s incredibly painful and have severely affected my mental health which was already a disaster before.

thank you

 

First of all, without a doctor’s diagnoses please refrain from self-Dr. Google diagnoses. You are scaring yourself. You have tooth and facial pain. That’s all you need to think.
You mention your mental health “was a disaster” before your pain?
What kind of stress are you under and have you been taking care of your mental health?
TMS is a psychological phenomenon that presents itself physically. There are many facial pain success stories with this approach:




Start by reading a book by Dr. Sarno and educating yourself about TMS. It can help your mind begin to realize that you can become pain free. Finding this website is the first step.
No more Dr. Google, social media groups that are full of alarm and doom and gloom. Drop any “medical” label and choose to overcome this.

 

I had persistent pain in a molar on my lower left side. Every night after dinner, I would pack ice around the tooth and gum to numb it and stop the pain. My dentist wanted to do a root canal. I was skeptical because I thought my problem might be TMS because of my history of having had and recovered from TMS elsewhere in my body. I told him I wanted to get a second opinion from a specialist, an an orthodontist. The orthodontist told me there was no reason for a root canal. I soldiered on packing ice around the tooth and gum for years. Altogether the tooth pain persisted for more than two decades.

When I retired, I moved far away and needed to find a new dentist. My new dentist had a private practice three days a week, and he spent one day a week at a university dental school supervising a teaching clinic that specialized in treating patients with chronic tooth pain whose regular dentists had been unable to treat it successly and referred them to the the university clinic. When I told him about my persistent tooth pain, he examined me and told me I had atypical odontalgia. I knew that “odontalgia" was just a fancy name for tooth pain. I figured that “atypical” meant he could not find any of the typical structural causes of chronic pain that he was accustomed to seeing in the chronic tooth pain clinic. Then I had an epiphany while still sitting in the dental chair: my problem is for sure TMS. My tooth pain stopped that day and has never come back in the ten years or so since then.

How could that be? Dr. Sarno is famous for saying TMS is caused by repressed anger. But he also recognized that another cause of TMS is Pavlovian conditioning. He discussed that in his last three books. Here is part of what he said about conditioning in The Divided Mind:

“One of the prime characteristics of TMS is that the pattern of symptoms will develop as a result of Pavlovian conditioning. People will experience the kind of symptoms they have learned to expect to experience, just as Pavlov’s dogs learned to associate the presentation of food with the ringing of a bell. Elizabeth von R had pain associated with standing and walking, though there was nothing neurologically wrong with her. Another patient with similar pain will say that it is sitting that brings on the pain, while walking relieves it. Experience with large numbers of patients in our clinic makes it clear that these are programmed responses having no relationship to anything beyond what the patient is conditioned to expect.” (The italicization is Sarno’s; the underlining is mine.)”
​

My epiphany while still sitting in the dental chair included the realization that I had become conditioned to expect pain after I chewed food on the left side of my mouth. The solution was that I stopped expecting that.

I have never had a nerve issue related to a tooth, but years ago I did injure my right ulnar nerve at the elbow. It caused tingling pain in my right little finger and to a lesser degree in part of the ring finger. After the pain persisted for several months, I consulted a neurologist. He told me my injured nerve would spontaneously regenerate at the rate of one inch per month, starting from the soma (cell body) and moving outward. Since the distance from the soma, which is near the spinal cord, to my elbow is about sixteen inches, he said the tingling would stop in about sixteen months. That is exactly what happened.

I was dubious at first, however, so I did a little research. Here is what I learned. There are six degrees of nerve injury. With the first three degrees, healing is spontaneous. With the last three, surgery is required before healing can occur. With the first degree, spontaneous healing occurs within days to three months. With the second degree, regeneration spontaneously occurs at the rate of one inch a month. That was my situation. With the third degree, spontaneous regeneration occurs at the rate of one inch a month, but recovery is partial rather than full. With the fourth and fifth degrees, healing does not occur spontaneously. It requires surgical nerve repair, graft, transfer, or neurolysis (removal of scar tissue), after which healing occurs at the rate one inch per month. With the sixth degree, recovery is highly variable depending on the type of injury. Since your neurologist said nothing about surgery, I am guessing that he thought your nerve would heal spontaneously.