FATTY DEGENERATIVE OSTEONECROSIS OF THE JAWBONE (FDOJ)
ISCHEMIC OSTEO NECROSIS (bone death due to poor blood supply)
Is a disease of the entire skeleton
it can affect any bone in the body. It is best known as a hip condition, yet it is actually more common in the jawbone. This fact has however, gone unacknowledged by mainstream medicine and dentistry.
It is simply a hollow space or pocket in the bone; which is not visible to the eye and often causes no local discomfort, though it can be the hidden cause of facial pain.
The chief initiating factor is trauma to the jaw, often brought on by standard dental treatment. Under longstanding extraction sites of dental patients, intraosseous vacuolations form which produce painful lesions recognized by enlightened dentists as Neuralgia-Inducing Cavitational Osteonecrosis (NICO). These are pathological entities forming osteo-cavitations that sit alongside of or under root canal fillings put in by endodontists or dentists as substitutes to keep teeth that should have been removed. As such, the NICOs are major sources of systemic signs and symptoms which until recently had not been recognized as the reason for illnesses.
The dead areas in a jaw bone come from actions common in dentistry such as tooth extractions, root canal treatments, and even drilling on a tooth. The farther back in the mouth the tooth extraction is, the more likely it is that a cavitation will form if the tooth socket is not properly cleaned out.
A correct technique for tooth socket cleaning includes the removal of the periodontal ligament that attaches the tooth to the socket, and removal of a portion of the bony socket.
Neuralgia-Inducing Cavitational Osteonecrosis (NICO) is a jawbone version of ischemic osteonecrosis, a common disease affecting any bone but with special affinity for those of the hips, knees and face. Osteonecrosis, and its "lesser" variants, bone marrow edema and regional (transient) ischemic osteoporosis), is a problem of poor blood flow through the marrow and 4/5 of affected patients have underlying coagulation problems. By definition, NICO is associated with pain. Osteonecrosis itself may or may not be painful. It may or may not affect multiple sites in one bone, or multiple bones.
You may think that if you had an infection in your jaw, you would know it. Surely there would be pain, inflammation, tenderness – and your dentist would find the problem in the course of your routine check-ups. WRONG! Chronic osteomyelitis (cavitation) of the jawbone is not characterized by the usual signs of infection (inflammation, redness, fever, pus) – it most often is a silent, undetected, condition.
Surprisingly it is a condition dentists are not trained in school to recognize. In fact, they’re not even taught that it exists. This is difficult to believe since cavitations in the jawbone are not a new discovery; it was described as early as 1848 by Thomas Bond in the first oral pathology book.
We use 3D (three dimensional) cone technology to help diagnose the presence of compromised bone and potential infected areas; applied kinesiology, electro-dermal / electro acupuncture, and thermography are also viable diagnostic tools.
Autopsy Case of Ischemic Osteonecrosis
The first autopsy example of NICO was published in the Journal of Oral Pathology & Medicine in 1999. This photo, from that case, illustrates a subcortical region of mushy brown marrow with microcavitations (arrows), located in the mandibular second and third molar region. This was barely visible on radiographs and the patient had been previously treated, unsuccessfully (prior to NICO therapy), for atypical facial neuralgia/pain of this nerve branch and trigeminal neuralgia of the second trigeminal nerve branch. Notice the glistening brown/gray semitranslucent material around the inferior alveolar nerve. The nerve canal is mostly destroyed by the disease, leaving this "gelatinous marrow," a sign of ischemic damage.
How can Chronic Jaw Osteitis/ NICO lesions cause disease? visit the amazing web site of Dr. J Lechner:
http://www.dr-lechner.de/engl/