By the way, I had also wanted to reach out to you to let you know what I have been finding in my own patients concerning TMJ pain. My other main focus in veterinary medicine, other than rehabilitation, is actually in dentistry. Having the knowledge of how to find TMJ pain better than before, I started to look for it much more often. Since I see many patients for dental issues I started to evaluate them before and after dental procedures. While I definitely agree that there's likely some TMJ pain that comes from pets having their mouth open for too long during the procedure, and have seen some patients get acutely worse right after a procedure (luckily most of the time I can see them uncomfortable and fix it even before they're go home), I feel like TMJ pain is much more common than I ever imagined. As a rough estimate of all of the pets that I see with likely dental infection, I would estimate that about half of those patients show signs of TMJ pain before the dental procedure. Having even rougher estimates, because I have much less data considering not every pet I see goes through with the procedure and only a portion come back in for a recheck examination after extractions, I find that around a third of the dogs that had TMJ pain beforehand still show some TMJ discomfort even after the problem teeth are removed. Unfortunately, owners are even worse at realizing oral pain in pets than musculoskeletal pain in pets. That is mostly because most of the time pets won't do anything to outwardly show that pain. I should start to keep actual statistics of what I see, but know that remembering to do things like that is not my strong suit.
Even without actual statistics I thought you might be interested in hearing what I had noticed. - JV