The Skinny on Botox in Dentistry

We all know that when you feel great, you function better. And yet, so many of us try to function with muscles that are tight and stressed, which doesn’t help us at all.

Typically, people carry stress in their head and neck muscles. Through unconscious habits like teeth grinding and jaw clenching, these muscles can place your teeth at risk of suffering long-term trauma. Grinding and clenching breaks down tooth enamel and wears out dental restorations like implants, bridges, and crowns, while also causing you to experience constant discomfort. After a while, you forget what the comfort of relaxed muscles even feels like.

In truth, jaw pain is seldom the result of a bad temporomandibular joint (TMJ) but is rather the result of the muscles pulling excessively or in an unbalanced manner. As these muscles become stressed, they trigger discomfort and pain throughout the face, head, neck, and body. This results in your face feeling tense and stressed, and trigger points may develop that cause you to feel pain in remote areas of the body whenever you touch them. You wake up each morning with general soreness and headaches, forcing you to live on aspirin or ibuprofen, just to get through the day.

At Advanced Dental Arts NW, we are excited to now offer our patients a variety of effective treatments. For immediate relaxation of the muscles, we can offer nearly immediate relief with Botox. With Botox TMJ treatments, our team can treat that tension, break up those trigger points, and finally let those muscles relax. Botox TMJ treatments can provide relief from stressed muscles for months and can be refreshed almost indefinitely. The muscles relax, the tension fades, the clouds part and life looks optimistic once again. It is an amazing experience.

Not only will you feel and sleep better, but you will also LOOK better, thanks to the proven power of Botox to remove or reduce facial wrinkles. While Botox treatment for TMJ works to relax facial muscles for the physical benefit, the youthful appearance that relaxed muscles provide is such a phenomenal bonus we cannot ignore its benefits.

Please give our dental office a call so we can chat with you about the variety of ways dental Botox treatments can help you. Safe. Convenient. Effective. Because we at Advanced Dental Arts NW want you to experience all that life can offer in comfort and style.

IF YOU KNOW WHAT “TRIGGER POINTS” ARE, YOU NEED TO SEE US

No one enjoys feeling pain and discomfort. But a large number of us live with pain simply because we have no alternative. For years, Botox has been primarily used for the youthful benefits it bestows upon certain muscles, without necessarily addressing the CAUSE of the tension in those muscles.
By treating and breaking up Trigger Points, dental Botox treatments allow muscles to heal naturally, providing effective long-term relief from Trigger Point headaches and tension. All with the natural side effects of helping you look younger, with fewer facial wrinkles. Dental Botox treatments also help to minimize teeth grinding and clenching, which allows both your natural teeth and any porcelain restorations to last even longer.

The Do’s and Don’t’s of Dental Botox Treatments

Botox relaxes muscles, which reduces internal tension on the skin. This effect creates the appearance of smoother and less wrinkled skin. It diminishes the crow’s feet around the eyes, furrows in the forehead, and frown lines between the eyebrows. The clinical advantages of Botox treatments have been recognized, and FDA approved, for decades.

After undergoing advanced training, Dr. Teasdale and the rest of the staff at Advanced Dental Arts NW are now able to use Botox to treat problems that directly affect patients’ oral health, such as teeth grinding and nighttime jaw clenching. Dr. Teasdale does this by treating the very same muscles that cause tension in the head and neck. Because Dr. Teasdale routinely treats these muscles, he understands how to look for the CAUSE of the tension in the muscles, not merely to treat the esthetics. However, the full esthetic benefit is invariably a highly desirable side effect of the relaxed muscles.

Botox merely puts muscles to sleep, greatly decreasing their power to contract and spasm. The effective time is generally three to four months. Sometimes longer, seldom shorter, and it can be refreshed without limit.

Botox does NOT have a long-term effect on the muscles, nor on the skin that overlays those muscles. When it wears off, the muscles and skin may return to where they were before; restoring wrinkles, but no worse than before treatment. There are no disadvantages when using properly placed Botox treatments. There could be slight bruising immediately following the treatment, but we do offer therapies to diminish the extent of bruising, and to speed the resorption of the bruise. But bruising rarely occurs..

Botox can also be used to diminish the “gumminess” of smiles, by limiting the degree that the upper lip can be raised. This enables us to create a perfect frame for your smiles and to add beauty and sensuality to your natural teeth or porcelain veneers and crowns. Dental Botox treatments do not add volume anywhere on the muscle, and frequently reduce the bulk of many of the overworked muscles, creating a thinner and more relaxed appearance.

Please give our dental office a call so we can chat with you about the variety of ways dental Botox treatments can help you. Safe. Convenient. Effective. Because we at Advanced Dental Arts NW, Portland dentist Dr. Teasdale wants you to experience all that Life can Offer in comfort and style.