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Dr. Talley, you're the founder of the
American Academy of Craniofacial Pain.
How do you go about creating awareness about
TMJ even among other professionals?
There's two levels - one is the professional level,
professional to professional and that's
the medical community and the dental community
sharing and supplying information to one another.
And, again, based on fact and anatomy and science;
not on my opinion of what does this or what does that,
do I like this or do I like that.
I take those out of my equation.
And that is where we educate doctors,
physicians, dentists, all types of physicians
and dentists in that sense
even chiropractic physicians;
all the specialties of medicine
especially ENT and orthopedics.
And then other professions,
physical therapy, body mechanics specialists,
people who deal in rehab, things of that nature.
But educating the professionals
and that's what organizations like the
American Academy of Craniofacial Pain
does and I teach in a number of those
with other people.
And, by the way, I'm one of 15 people that
founded that academy.
I'm not the sole founder of that academy.
But the 15 of us were the people who put this together
back 20 plus years ago,
almost 25 years ago now and our purpose was to
educate the professions.
But we also have another subcategory where we
educate the public and that's using support group elements,
educators that are outside the field of dentistry
that can provide information, data,
resources, knowledge, direction, referrals,
for instance, to appropriate practitioners
who can deal with these problems for them.
And that's where that comes in,
to see the public's involvement in this.
It's an ever-challenging issue because there's
so many problems that the public has in health
that this is just one but it is such a demanding one
for so many people that there's so much inadequate information
that we keep this constant sharing.
And it's getting better and better with
new media opportunities and things of that nature
to share this information.
And then we have to assess it and that's where it comes in to
how do you make a diagnosis,
how do you evaluate people and it takes time,
it takes interview knowledge history.
The history is the single most important thing.
From the history I can almost build a diagnosis
without even touching someone.
But the examination, the physical structural
evaluation of the head, neck, jaw, face, mouth
is critically important.
And then understanding what you're looking at.
Not everyone's trained the same.
Different doctors have different backgrounds.
And medicine doesn't know much about dentistry,
dentistry doesn't typically know much about medicine
outside of the mouth area.
So those of us who do this are kind of a hybrid.
I'm a dentist but I don't practice general dentistry.
I deal with pain and dysfunction and that leads
also to airway problems which is a spinoff of this.
But all this system gets in trouble and it can have
pain associated with it which is the
biggest motivator to most patients to come in and see us.