Hello and welcome to the Wellness Mama podcast. I'm Katie from wellness mama.com and I'm back today

with Dr. Sharon Dickerson to talk about TMJ and the nervous system, which is a topic I have not

covered before. But we go deep on how TMJ, what it is for one, how it impacts the nervous system,

how to know if it might be impacting your nervous

system, some holistic approaches, how to deal with the neurological effects, and so much more.

And Dr. Dickerson is an absolute wealth of knowledge, and I feel like very unique in the

dental world. She's a biological dentist who also specializes in trauma-informed care, which is an area that

often I feel like is not even talked about, much less really provided resources for. So I love her work,

and I love that she addresses the root cause of oral health problems and really has made it

her mission to help people who feel like they could never receive gentle care because of past

trauma and triggers to be able to again. Definitely learned a lot in this episode and I know you

will too, so let's jump in. Dr. Dickerson, welcome back. Thank you for being here again.

Thank you for having me. Well, I will link to our first episode in the show notes. If you guys

haven't heard it, absolutely fascinating about oral toxins, root cause approach, trauma-informed dentistry. I learned so much. And Sharon, I'm excited to learn from you again today about specifically TMJ and how it relates to the nervous system. I'm guessing there's a lot to learn on this topic. So to start

broad, can you maybe walk us through what TMJ is and how someone might know if they have this

or if it could be an issue for them? Absolutely. So the TMJ is the temporal mandibular joint,

and it is the joint right in front of our ears that hinges our jaw in opening

and closing. I think for context, it's kind of interesting to note that this part of our body,

our TMJ, our facial muscles, our teeth are innervated by the largest cranial nerve in our body, the trigeminal nerve.

And there's just so much sensory and motor innervation and feedback to the brain

through the trigeminal nerve that informs our brain about, you know, where our jaw is in space,

how things are working with the teeth, are the teeth in

...