My thoughts on the TMJ dentist, Dr. Dwight Jennings
Where do we agree vs. disagree?
I first heard of Dwight Jennings about ten or eleven years ago when I was doing my initial research on TMJ.
What drew me to him was that even back then he talked a lot about the bigger picture. About the link to things like the brain and neurological dysfunction, which is what I was going through back in 2014.
Back then I thought he’d figured out something revolutionary and was one of the leaders in this game.
Now I consider him a dude that speaks ‘as if’ he understands how this stuff works.. but in reality has interpreted it all completely wrongly.
And i say that because everything I see him doing I consider wrong. And i’m sure his patients are the ones suffering for it.
Who is Dwight Jennings?
Dwight Jennings is a TMJ dentist that operates out of California and has been pretty known online for awhile now.
He has a pretty solid background in traditional dentistry, but somewhere along the way he realized that the conventional approach was missing something major.
And so he got into what he calls ‘jaw orthopedics”, which essentially means that he started concluding it was not just about the teeth but also the positioning of the jaw.
He saw on his patients that the jaw was often recessed and out of position and started concluding that this was causing a variety of neurological impacts on his patients. Namely through the trigeminal nerve.
And so he dove into ‘neuromuscular dentistry’, which is all about the muscles. They believe that correcting muscle length is key to fixing TMJ and other issues.
Dwight’s in love with “Substance P”
On Youtube videos you will often find Dwight talking about “Substance P”.
What it is: Substance P is a neuropeptide (a small signaling molecule) released by certain nerve endings, especially those associated with pain (nociceptors).
Function: It plays a role in transmitting pain signals from the peripheral nervous system (your body) to the central nervous system (your brain). It also regulates things like mood, anxiety, nausea, and inflammation.
What does he say about it?
Jennings argues that jaw misalignment and TMJ strain overstimulate the trigeminal nerve (the largest cranial nerve, linked to the face and jaw).
That overstimulation, he says, causes an excess release of Substance P, which then drives chronic pain, inflammation, and even systemic health problems (like neck pain, migraines, posture collapse, and sometimes autoimmune-like issues).
In his view, correcting the jaw alignment reduces the over-firing of the trigeminal nerve → lowers Substance P levels → reduces pain and inflammation throughout the body.
To him jaw alignment and “Substance P” is the link to wider disease
Dwight’s basically saying that this Substance P, which is triggered by jaw misalignment, is the key link to lots of wider health issues.
And I think that logic is very weak to be honest.
There are tons of logical reasons for why this is shortsighted. For example:
Does it explain why the rest of the cranial bones derange during the biomechanical collapse process?
Does it explain why the skeleton twists and the body is corrupted?
Does it explain why many internal organs dysfunction over time?
No… rather it takes this narrow view that jaw misalignment triggers more of this ‘Substance P’ creation, which is then the cause of lots of other health issues.
In my view the logic behind biomechanics is a far more accurate reflection of what you actually see.
You don’t see the jaw getting misaligned on its own… you see it happening with the the entire body and spine twisting along with it.
We agree only on the surface, outside of that we completely disagree
I do give credit to Dwight in that he has noticed the correlation between the dental realm and overall health. Something which many dentists & orthodontists prefer to stick their head in the ground on, like an ostrich.
You’ll see him drawing the link to things like cancer, Parkinson’s, etc. Very similar to the way I do.
But in my view that is where our similarities stop.
He does not recognize that this is a full body collapse process.
That any changes in your bite/skull are mirrored in the entire body/skeleton. Both when improving and when you are getting worse.
He doesn’t recognize the critical role that the ‘soft tissue’ plays and that it inflates and deflates the skull like a balloon. And how this deflating crushes the skull, causing things like cognitive issues.
Why doesn’t he realize all of this stuff that I realized?
Well probably because he didn’t experiment on his own body with these biomechanics for over a decade the way I did. In my view you NEED to do it on your own body to truly understand these full body relationships I talk about.
Rather he interprets it all as neurological dysfunction from this ‘Substance P”.
I’m absolutely not a fan of how he treats patients
If you watch the video above you’ll see the appliance he is typically using.
It looks to me a lot like a twinblock appliance with a block on the upper and a block on the lower.
The blocks are placed such that it kind of forces your jaw to bite more forward than it should. And the reason for this is that Jennings is trying to get your jaw to sit more forward at rest.
But i’ve done things like this tons of times years back and consider it 100% wrong.
Starting in late 2014 I was locking my jaw forward when doing Starecta, which uses an indexed lower splint that you register in ‘protrusion’. And later I even tried it with a twinblock appliance i had from my ALF dentist.
I always went in circles because you CANNOT lock the jaw in a single position. If you’re going to created a locked bite than it needs to have multiple supported jaw positions as I explain here:
The patient stories reveal the truth
We recently had someone in our Skool community talk about how they were treated by Jennings for 4-5 years starting back in 2017.
And how his treatment approach included drilling your back teeth during every appointment to ‘adjust and maintain a certain bite alignment’.
I think doing that is absolutely horrible and I totally disagree with ever drilling the teeth.
The person went on to say that it didn’t straighten the teeth, widen the palate nor fix any asymmetry. Which essentially means that no ‘inflation’ of the skull occurred.
Rather most likely the opposite occurred. The skull most likely deflated and further compensated due to the drilling and incorrect locking of a single bite position.
Which lines up with this quote that the patient made “In fact, it coincided with the time in my life when my cognition, brain fog, and fatigue got drastically worse.”
Closing thoughts
Dr. Dwight Jennings to me is your classic TMJ dentist based on my experience.
They sound all smart explaining their theory. And they say it with a lot of confidence, which inspires trust.
But when you go and dig up their actual past patients you start to see and hear a completely different story. One in which their patients go in circles and then they get ignored when they try to raise this to the dentist.
Been there.. had that happen to me many times in those early years.
In fact I do not doubt that if you dug up another 100 of Jennings’ past patients at least 30-50% of them would have a story that is similar to that of the person i mentioned above.
Why? Because he is doing the WRONG shit.
And if he disagrees with my conclusion let him respond by putting all of his ex-patients on an open community like i’m doing with our Skool community. We have 2000+ people, almost all of whom are doing Reviv, on our Skool community now.
They write and say whatever they want. Reviv is FAR more transparent than any dentist out there.
But despite this transparency almost everyone posts & comments about improvements.
Jennings will never do this.
Why?
Because he knows if he did.. it would be an absolute shit show of patients talking about how they either went in circles or got worse.
And that my friends… is the difference between Reviv and Dr. Dwight Jennings.
