Orofacial Pain Deep Dive: Diagnosing and Treating Orofacial Pain Including Primary Headaches, Neuropathic and Myofascial Pain, and TMJ

Are your patients crazy to complain about a pain that is not visible with imaging, and your intraoral exam is normal? Do you want to learn how to diagnose the invisible pains in the head and neck, and then decide if you want to treat or refer these patients? This lecture will expand upon the presentation Dr. Hirschinger gave in February 2022. There will be a short refresher of some of the topics discussed but the majority of the presentation will be new material to help you understand more about invisible pain.

After taking the course, the participant should be able to:

• Learn how to diagnose all of the primary headaches including migraine, cluster, and tension-type headaches along with treatment options.
• Review all of the branches of the trigeminal nerve that you don’t usually treat including the supratrochlear, supra and infraorbital, and auriculotemporal nerves along with the protocol to inject them.
• Recognize the signs and symptoms of occipital neuralgia including the treatment protocol.
  Understand sympathetically mediated pain, and learn how a sphenopalatine ganglion block is given without needles.
• Identify the difference between peripheral pain and systemic pain and how to treat each of them.
• Differentiate between muscle, joint, and odontogenic causes of recent bite changes and when and how to treat it without a handpiece.
• Identify all of the causes of tooth pain when you have ruled out the teeth.
• Learn why most orofacial pain specialists rarely need to treat TMJ.
• Case review of actual orofacial pain patients.