Taking Control of Tmj: Your Total Wellness Program for Recovering from Tempromandibular Joint Pain, Whiplash, Fibromyalgia, and Related Disorders

After reading the book for about 15 minutes, I tried the first exercise. My jaw felt immediate relief. I am very grateful for this book. It will certainly help in relieving pain and discomfort.


More MD's, DO's and DC's Should Read This Book!   January 19, 2000
29 out of 30 found this review helpful

I have been treating TMD for almost ten years and now have a book that is worth its weight in gold, for both patients and my sometimes uninformed and too busy colleagues in medicine.

I am a chiropractic physician, treating the moving parts of the body and their soft tissue (i.e. muscles, ligaments, cartilage) attachments and connections. Many of my colleagues in chiropractic, osteopathic and allopathic medicine, unfortunately, do not know how to properly diagnose or treat this condition. This book would be useful to fellow professionals as well as laypersons.

TMD is real, and poorly understood by many. Uppgaard does us a favor, too, by discussing TMD and whiplash injuries. Clearly a hot debate in the medical and engineering literature, even the national auto insurance industry admits that TMJ injuries occur at least 4% of the time. My guess, based on ten years experience treating motor vehicle collision (MVC) injuries is that the TMJ is injured closer to 50% of the time.

In any case, arguments such as "the TMJ cannot be injured in MVC" are clearly ridiculous based just on the epidemiological literature. Further, the methods used to investigate injury to the TMJ in human volunteer auto crash testing are still inadequate, still insensitive. An analogy would be to perform an MRI of the cervical spine in a patient after a car crash, getting a positive study showing a mildly herniated disc, only to find out during surgery (I referred the patient due to lack of treatment response after FOUR weeks, the federal and state standard for chiropractic medicine) that the disc is SEVERELY herniated, that two other disc "bulges" are in fact disc ruptures, and that there is severe damage to the posterior longitudinal ligament, facet capsular ligaments and interspinous ligaments. In plain English, the MRI is mostly a very INSENSITIVE test for seeing damage to ligaments other than the discs, even though it is often OVERVALUED by physicians, patients, and researchers studying MVC. And what you really have in this example is a grossly false negative study (see studies in Medline like those by Taylor et al. looking at autopsy studies of the spines of MVC victims who died of natural causes within days after their crashes).

So if your physician isn't looking for TMJ sprain-strain or dysfunction after a MVC, he or she isn't going to find it (and if your physician that day is an insurance company doctor, this could be the case, nudge, nudge, know what I mean?). And just because your doctor doesn't find a TMD or doesn't talk about it with you, or more commonly, doesn't WANT to talk about it with you (is embarrassed to say "I don't know", a common, arrogant, and too often devastating mistake), that doesn't mean your TMJ hasn't been injured.

Bravo for Dr. Uppgaard for bringing this common injury and condition to the masses. It provides a refreshing alternative to misguided books like one by Ferrari ("The Whiplash Encyclopedia") which denies TMD from whiplash, is biased, and which is hardly encyclopedic.

I would encourage both patients and their doctors to read Dr. Uppgaard's very useful book!


This book helped me reduce TMJ Pain   February 3, 2000
Kelley Hunt (TX, USA)
28 out of 29 found this review helpful

In his book, Dr. Uppgaard gives many suggestions for treating your own TMJ pain. I have been trying several of his suggestions and have experienced a great reduction in TMJ-related jaw, neck, and shoulder pain. I am so grateful that someone wrote a book on this, since my dentist and physician had few helpful suggestions for me. Thanks Dr. Uppgaard!


a non-invasive cure   April 10, 2002
25 out of 25 found this review helpful

This book offers a simple, non-invasive cure to a miserable problem that is poorly understood or treated. I had chronic jaw pain for over a year when I happened to meet Dr. Uppgaard at a holiday party. During our conversation the topic of TMJ came up and I learned that he had a book out on the subject. Within days of doing the simple exercises, my pain began to diminish, and was completely gone in about two weeks. Now it only returns during times of stress, and by doing these exercises again for a few days, it disappears. After all that time of being in pain, who could imagine that the solution could be so simple! This book is certainly an important "first try" before doing something like surgery which can makes the problem worse. THANK YOU, DR. BOB!