3) Drugs
Of course it wouldn’t be the 21st century if you didn’t have a myriad of drug companies competing for your attention and promising to cure each problem you have with one drug or another. There are certainly many drugs in existence which are known to substantially alter neurological activity patterns in the brain, and it is understandable that in a desire to help a patient who is suffering from sleep bruxism, a doctor may try prescribing one or more such drugs, especially when he or she has recently been visited by a drug company salesperson touting how this drug or that drug has been shown to reduce or eliminate bruxism in some patients.
Since no two people have the same pattern of neurological activity going on inside their heads when they habitually clenched her teeth at night, no two people are going to respond in exactly the same way to a drug that alters that pattern of neurological activity. Some patients report a substantial decrease in nighttime clenching and grinding from taking a particular dose of a particular neurological-pattern-altering drug, while other patients report no reduction in clenching and grinding from the same dosage of the same drug.
Before you go down the path of working with a doctor to investigate whether medication can reduce or eliminate your clenching and grinding, you may want to experiment with other methods first, for several reasons. One important reason is that drugs have side effects. In some people, one possible side effect is a permanent alteration in a neurological or neurochemical balance in your body. A much more common set of side effects can be thought of as psychological, neurological, or neurochemical effects which persist while taking the drug. Different classes of such effects include such things as changes in libido and ability to sexually perform, anxiety level, energy level, ability to sleep, etc..
A second reason to try other methods before drugs is that some drugs can be habit-forming or addicting. Another reason that can be a factor is cost. Some drugs are very expensive, and the cost of even less expensive drugs adds up to be quite substantial over time.
