Why Migraines Start With Your Teeth

“Migraines start with your teeth?”

“What?”

“Ridiculous!” you say.

Well, now wait just a minute— migraines, and most all other primary headaches, don’t actually come from your teeth, but actually come from the way your teeth fit together. Dentists call that “occlusion”. But that’s a misnomer. It’s not actually the way the occlusion fits when the upper and lower dental arches fully interdigitate at full-force occlusion, or closure, that counts. It’s the way the occlusion makes the upper and lower jaws fit that counts. When the so-called “occlusion” of the teeth, through the fit of its particular cuspal interdigitation, forces the upper and lower jaws, hinged to each other back in the temporomandibular joint, to fit together improperly, against the particular design intents of Nature, there can be trouble! The migraine family of headaches (and the tension-type headaches which are their immediate predecessors) is a TMD “epiphenomenon”. Here’s why.