Dear Colleague:

Welcome aboard, and thank you for your interest in neural therapy.

In my experience, physicians in the English-speaking world of medicine who have been exposed to neural therapy are fascinated by it. However, this fascination can quickly turn to frustration when they begin to look for written information about how it works, how it is applied and what to do when it does not work.

My book, Neural Therapy: Applied Neurophysiology and Other Topics, has been an effort to remedy this situation. As far as I know, it is the only English-language textbook on the subject since the translation of the German text by Peter Dosch 25 years ago. (His son, Mathias, has since published a reference book, Atlas of Neural Therapy: With Local Anesthetics.) However, much more is needed than textbooks.

In my opinion, neural therapy builds on applied neurophysiology, but it takes experience to develop that "sixth sense" of where the interference fields might be found. Experience also tells us when to look for confounding factors‐factors that might be limiting the effectiveness of treatment.

"Only a fool learns by experience; a wise man learns by the experience of others"... or so the saying goes. My hope is that this newsletter will be a resource allowing you to learn from the neural therapy experiences of others‐and share your own experiences.

My plan is to offer a case history, a clinical pearl or an observation with each issue. Some basic knowledge of neural therapy will be assumed. I may discuss more advanced topics later depending on readers' response. You are invited to contribute, question and challenge. (I reserve the right to edit).

So here goes:

What causes mystery pain in a tooth? Dental pain can be a difficult diagnostic problem. There are times when a patient will have a most unpleasant toothache for which the dentist can find no cause. In desperation, the dentist will sometimes perform a root canal procedure in the hope of obtaining relief.

If the root canal fails, an adjacent tooth is sometimes judged to be the culprit. If that tooth also is treated endodontically and the pain persists, extraction of a tooth or teeth is often tried. But frequently the patient is left with the same pain.

On several occasions, I have seen patients who have endured three successive root canals on adjacent teeth followed by three extractions‐to no effect. The teeth are almost always upper premolars and molars, although "mystery pain" may also occur in lower teeth.

Simons and Travell's textbook, Myofascial Pain and Dysfunction: The Trigger Point Manual, describes referred pain to teeth from trigger points in the temporalis, masseter and digastric muscles.

These muscles share with the teeth innervation by autonomic nervous system fibers synapsing in regional ganglia: the sphenopalatine ganglia for the temporalis and upper masseter muscles and the upper teeth and the inframandibular ganglia for the digastric and lower masseter muscles and the lower teeth.

Permanent cure of these "mystery" pains is almost always achieved by one injection of procaine ½% into the appropriate ganglia. The techniques are described in detail in Neural Therapy: Applied Neurophysiology and Other Topics.

An alternative and equally effective treatment is by way of an electro-physical device, the TensCam (available from Charles Crosby, DO, of Orlando, Florida at 407-823-9502).

Sincerely,

Robert F. Kidd, MD, CM