Day 1 Tooth pain and past experience with TMS

Hi everyone,

finally starting my journey (again) on TMS. I have experienced TMS roughly 10 years ago as your typical mouse-arm / RSI type pain. Back then I went to many different doctors and physio therapists but all the therapy, stretching and so on didnt help. After more than a year I came across TMS and quickly realized that this is what caused my suffering. Back then it only took a couple of days and my pain reduced by 90%. After using the structured educational program for around 10 days the pain was completely gone and never came back since.

So I thought my days of TMS are over and would never come back. Now the might have come back however this time I'm struggeling more with the diagnosis:

1.5 years ago I went to the dentist who told me that one of my crowns should be replaced since it was getting a bit old and worn out. After the procedure I startet having pain in my tooth that lastet longer than what the doc described as being "normal". We took scans of my tooth but everything looked normal and there was no sign of inflamation. Still the pain did not go away and even got worse as time passed. But again my dentist told me he couldnt see any inflamed nerves or anything like that.

After roughly 10 days I startet having pain in my tooth whenever there was a sound around me. Any sound would cause pain. I startet noticing this first when I was working on my laptop. Every klick and klack sound of my keyboard and mouse would send a pain signal through my tooth and the longer I worked and the more sounds there were the worse it got. This also applied to any sound you might hear in your normal life like trucks driving next to my house, people speaking, TV and radio audio and so on. Just every audio hurt my tooth. I ended up hiding at home, trying to avoid hearing any sounds. I didnt leave my apartment, didnt talk to anybody, could watch tv or spend time with anyone.

My dentist (and several other dentists since then) told me he had never heard of such symptoms before and didnt know how to help me except do a root canal which I was terrified off. Since my pain got ever worse and I wasnt able to work or lead a normal life anymore I finally decided to get the root canal done. This ended the connection between sounds and tooth pain and I thought that would be it. However a light stinging pain that comes and goes persistet and I have been dealing with that for the past year and a half.

The pain is not always there. Sometimes I feel an uncomfortable feeling around my tooth for half the day. Sometimes I get a flash like pain shooting through for half a second and that happens maybe 1-3 times per day. Some days I dont feel it at all. Especially when I'm in social situations where I'm involved with different people I often dont think about it and dont feel it. I'm trying to observe to connection between my generell stress level and the pain but so far I am not sure its directly correlated.

The root canal has since been repeated 5 times, the last time under a microscope done by a specialist. Again nothing changed and all scans and pictures looked perfect. The last thing we tried was doing a 3d scan that would show everything going on in and under my tooth but again everything looked fine except for some darker spot that the dentist described as probably just scar tissue from all the treatment.

So now my dentist(s) are all telling me there is nothing medically wrong with my tooth. The pain is still there sometimes, it doesnt get worse but it doesnt get better. So now I'm starting to think if this is TMS and I startet to do the educational program. However I'm still struggling with accepting the diagnosis because I'm unsure if there isnt something there after all and also tooth pain is not your typical TMS pain as far as I know. I think I would be more ready to accept it if it was my RSI again or some sort of back pain.

Any tips are welcome.

 

There are plenty of posts on this forum as tooth pain, I have it as a symptom too. Rest assured, tms can be anything, and tms is known to reoccur simply because we are human and the mind/body connection is real.

I attribute mine to tension and anxiety.

 

Hi, Thomas08. I get atypical facial pain and phantom tooth pain. When I was going through my divorce, the pain in my lower teeth on the left side was intense sometimes. It was not coming from the teeth at the time. Time has passed and due to dental phobia, those teeth eventually did end up with problems and I was too scared to get the work done when they just needed fillings, so they progressed to needing root canals, so I went with extraction. Sometimes, when under stress, I still get the same pain I got during the divorce, but there are no teeth there now. For several months before I had the second of the two molars pulled last December, I would get an odd feeling under it, like it was itchy, and it would make me want to bite down harder on it, like I was scratching an itch. I was sure that was caused by the decay on the tooth. Well, that tooth is gone and the tooth still itches sometimes! All this to say, that I do believe tooth symptoms can absolutely be TMS. You've done what you can at the dentist - five root canals would be unimaginable to me! At this point, your symptoms could very well be TMS.

 

Thank you all for your replies. Very encouraging and good to hear I'm not the only one with issues like that.