From a dull ache around your jaw to electric-like shock sensations in your face, chronic facial pain has a way of hijacking your life and becoming the center of your focus.
There are several routes to chronic facial pain, and the in-depth team at Johnston Pain Management has extensive experience with most of them. Here, we look at common culprits behind facial pain, their symptoms, and the next steps you should take to get you on the road to relief.
When it comes to facial pain, few conditions deliver it as severely as trigeminal neuralgia. At the heart of trigeminal neuralgia is a compression of your trigeminal nerve, which provides sensation for much of your face.
If your trigeminal nerve is compressed, it can lead to shock-like sensations in your face that are very painful and often described as lightning bolts.
Thankfully, trigeminal neuralgia isn’t all that common and only has a lifetime prevalence of about 0.16% to 0.3% of the general population.
Your jaw is attached to your head by two small hinge joints on either side called your TMJs. If you clench or grind your teeth or your TMJs are misaligned, it can lead to chronic facial pain. This pain may flare in the morning after a night of teeth grinding, or it can be a constant companion in the background.
Your face contains four pairs of sinuses, and if there’s inflammation in any of these cavities, it can lead to facial pain. If you consider that chronic sinusitis affects nearly 29 million adults in the United States, you can see that this condition is a common driver of facial pain. This pain often feels like pressure from inside your head.
If you have an infection in your mouth from tooth decay or gum disease, it can very much lead to facial pain.
For the 40 million Americans who suffer chronic migraines, facial pain on one side is often part of the picture.
As you can see, facial pain can stem from a variety of conditions, so identifying the root cause of your discomfort is our priority. Of course, equally as important is helping you to find relief from your pain, which we work on at the same time.
Once we identify the underlying cause of your facial pain, we can tailor our treatments to help you achieve more long-lasting relief. Of course, we don’t have enough room here to go into specific treatment plans for each of the conditions above, but we want to assure you that there are remedies that can help you feel more comfortable.
To get to the bottom of your facial pain, we invite you to contact us at one of our conveniently located offices in Jacksonville, Hampstead, or New Bern, North Carolina, to schedule a consultation.
