Many patients complain of earache, pain in the face and jaws, shooting pains in the teeth and tender teeth. Sometimes such pain may be difficult to investigate, but often they are due to referred pain from tensed chewing muscles even though toothache certainly may have a natural cause in tooth infection. In the attachments of the chewing muscles in the face and jaws there are pain receptors. One ore more coustantly tensed chewing muscle may for that reason cause both pain in the muscle and the attachment of the muscle and the surrounding tissue. The attachments are close to the ears, the cheeks, the jaws and the temples why muscle tension often simulates earache, pain in the sinuses, pain in the temples (headache) and tooth pain. Shooting pains in the teeth and tender teeth, as many patients complain of is in many cases caused by overloading of the teeth when we are clenching and bruxing our teeth.

Painful headache.
Patients with tension in the jaw and neck often complain of a severe type of headache, they experience as a neck complaint. They describe a centre of the pain in the upper cervical spine with a pain distribution upwards the back of the head with pain radiation above the ear or in the top of the head. The headache may be unilateral or bilateral. By the pain radiation upwards to the top of the head, the patients also describe a feeling of pressure in the area