Feb 28, 2009 Hello everyone. I am new to this, so bar with me.  It's about my sister.  She is 52 now and back about 25-30 yrs ago she had braces and wore some kind of relaxer mechanism that allowed her jaw muscles to relax and she was left with a very obvious misallignment of upper to lower teeth.  She developed joint pain and the Doctors decided to take out her lower jaw and cut it and reshape and wired it together.  Then, they cut off her upper teeth from her scull and reduced the width a bit and wired it back in.  She still had the joint pain, so she was fitted with an orthotic (fake) joint and after a few years it disintegrated.  They they cut out a piece of her scull taking just a few layers and made a lever for her jaw to work with (the bad orthotic had left an opening to her brain that had to be closed),  She is in constant pain, can't eat or talk much and is now addicted to prescription pain meds.  I asked her couldn't she have another surgery or have a nerve cut?  She said no to options of surguries andthe nerve would be the trigeminal and that wasn't an option either.  Her life is ruined...from pain and more so by the pain medication.  Any comments?