About trigeminal neuralgia

Being the 5th of the 12 cranial nerves, the Trigeminal Nerve is responsible for transmitting the sensation of touch and facial pain to the brain through its 3 neural branches.

When this nerve suffers from some kind of disorder, the person feels an electric cramp that manifests itself in a paroxysmal, sudden and intense facial pain that can extend through the gums, lips and cheek to the eye socket. As you can imagine or already know, this can lead to a situation that is as uncomfortable as it is disabling.

It is not infrequently derived from causes that many professionals consider idiopathic. Although I think that these "diagnoses" lack the appropriate education to contemplate the problem from a broader and more investigative perspective.

At the anatomical and cranial level, the most common cause of neuralgia of this 5th cranial nerve comes from the compression that an aberrant intracranial blood vessel loop generates in the nerve itself, in the entry zone of its root, in the brainstem. Other times, as in the recent case of a patient, it is the result of a dermatome affected by a previous episode of Herpes Zoster.
On the other hand, when such neuralgia occurs in young people, we should point to the presence of possible Multiple Sclerosis.

To counteract facial pain and reduce neural discharges, allopathic medicine offers its well-known aspirin, paracetamol and various opioids. And if this is not enough, they even resort to drugs for the treatment of epilepsy.

From functional medicine, we prefer to recommend something as natural as Vitamin B complex to alleviate neural discharges, and less intoxicating and barbituric practices such as YNSA cranio-puncture and cranial osteopathy. As long as cranial structures such as the Malar bone, Temporal bone and TMJ are involved, as well as a bad positioning of these, we will not only be able to reduce the symptoms but also treat the cause that triggers the neuralgia.