Bizarre Case of Mouth Pain, With an Explanation and a Solution (Member Post)

So what did I find in my mouth?!

My medial pterygoid muscle, standing out in sharp relief. The medial pterygoid is kind of like the masseter muscle, but smaller and on the inside of the temporomandibular joint, instead of the outside. You can see where it is normally — under the mucosa behind the molars. But it’s not normally visible like a bulging muscle.

Mine was: a dramatic bridge of tissue, a hard cord standing well out from the normal surface of the tissue, dramatically changing the contours of the area, as obvious as a flexed biceps muscle. Completely and obviously different from the other side.

It was cramping. It was obviously contracted.

My first thought: cause or symptom? Maybe it was just cramping as a reaction to the painful situation. Seeing the state it was in was certainly interesting, but it was hardly reassuring.

Rubbing it out

The medial pterygoid may be at the back of the mouth, but it’s easy to reach. I reached in and pressed on it. It felt like a bowstring, and was exquisitely sensitive. Gentle pressure made my soft palate light up with the same pain that had driven me nuts all night… and it also spread, less dramatically, to the teeth, jaw, and cheek.

I had never once bee conscious of pain at the location of the muscle itself.

I rubbed it gently for about 30 seconds. It was an great relief, as clearly helpful as stretching out a cramping calf muscle.

It visibly softened as I watched, fading into the mucosa like Homer simpson backing into the hedge.

The cramp was gone. The pain was gone. It did not come back. That was simply the end of it — like I’d flipped a switch.

Some reactions to this odd experience

3. How many other strange aches and pains, some of them causing intense suffering, have similar causes that we can’t see? Or rub?
4. The proximate cause of this pain was clearly distressed muscle tissue. It is completely unclear why the muscle was in that state. There could be any number of deeper explanations, some of them ominous (e.g. neuropathy). But the tissue that actually hurt was muscle.
5. We could certainly call this a “trigger point,” because that’s the widely accepted informal label for exquisitely sore spots in soft tissue. But the every bit of the muscle that I could touch was sore. I am unclear if the cramping tissue was the entire muscle, or just one patch of fibres, the infamous “taught band” associated with trigger points.
6. Massage for the win! Holy crap! It was so little massage it barely even qualifies. Such a dramatic and quick result is consistent with a widely held belief that “fresh” trigger points are more tractable.

Where’s your trigger point skepticism now, buddy?

I have my doubts about trigger point therapy, as any rational person should if they are familiar with all the rank bullshit that pollutes the field of massage therapy. Trigger point therapy gets badly overhyped.

I have even doubted my own best anecdote about being helped by trigger point therapy. It was almost a quarter century ago, and it was extremely similar to this one — an incident that took place only a centimetre away in my face from this one. I had a terrible toothache. I was miserable and had a dentist appointment the next morning. I fully expected it to be a rotting tooth.

By sheer chance, I had a massage therapy appointment first — and my massage therapist fixed my toothache completely … by rubbing my jaw.

In the many years since then, as a hardened skeptic prone to questioning my own perceptions, I have come to doubt that story. It had faded into dubious legend. After this experience with my medial ptergyoid, its credibility seems restored to me. That really happened, and so did this.