- Joe -

Appearances can be deceiving–and in Joe’s case, they were working against him. His teeth were dark and badly stained, making him look older than his years. When he came to see us for a consult, we also discovered that his enamel had become so thin that it had begun to chip and break, and appeared translucent. Even worse: he had been grinding his teeth until they had become progressively shorter. This was a triple challenge! The best solution would be to fully reconstruct his teeth (replacing what had been ground down), and to establish a new, optimum bite position. With our state-of-the-art equipment, we were able to determine three-dimensionally exactly where Joe’s jaw joint was located beneath his skin and muscle, and whether or not its position was physiologically correct.  We discovered Joe’s jaw joint was not in an optimal physiologic location. In order to determine where that relaxed position is spatially, we need to relax his jaw joint.  We used an Ultra-Low-Frequency, Transcutaneous Electrical Stimulator (ULF-TENS). The ULF-TENS delivers a precisely regulated, rhythmic stimulus to both the chewing and facial muscles, and allowed us to determine the most relaxed and muscularly balanced jaw position. Then, once this position was recorded, we could build porcelain crowns that would fulfill and maintain it. People often assume that the teeth have to be ground down considerably for most reconstructions. But the truth is that, in most reconstructions, the patients have already ground down their teeth quite a bit–in some cases, almost 80% of the tooth mass has been eroded by chronic grinding. So our goal for Joe was to limit the amount of necessary preparation, and to augment what had been lost. Joe’s heavy workload required a great deal of travel. With careful scheduling, we were able to complete the entire treatment in about two months.