Hybrid Bell’s palsy recovery program

An asymmetric smile in Bell’s palsy patients occurs due to involuntary activation of the muscle that pulls down the mouth corner each time your brain sends a “Smile!” command to your face. That muscle is called Depressor Anguli Oris, and it is the antagonist of the Zygomatic Major muscle, which is responsible for normal “smile production”.

You will learn to improve the background relaxation of your facial muscles by reducing unnecessary brain activity in that direction. You will also learn certain manual techniques to maintain the depressor anguli oris muscle better relaxed at all times, reducing its opposing efforts that lead to the asymmetry of your smile.

The scale of improvements in the symmetry of your smile will greatly depend on your patience, persistence, and regularity of efforts.

Facial pains – spontaneous or in response to touch, occur due to excessive tension and even micro-cramps in facial muscles or their separate fibres.

In the course of rehabilitation programs, our patients achieve substantial reduction or even complete disappearance of facial pain.

Similarly to pains, the stiffness and tightness of facial muscles have the same origin: the presence of constant background contraction signals that the brain sends to the facial muscles. This wrong “habit” develops during the process of long recovery.

As you progress with your rehabilitation program, the tension and tightness in your facial muscles are likely to substantially reduce. In some cases, they may even completely disappear.

Please bear in mind that achieving improvements is a process that requires time, persistence and regularity of effort.

The regeneration of the facial nerve after the acute phase of Bell’s palsy is a time-consuming process. Usually, by 8-12 months, the recovery of the nerve fibres reaches a plateau and slows down substantially.

During the rehabilitation program, together, we can stimulate your facial nerve nucleus and promote a more active regeneration of nerve fibers even many years past the onset of facial palsy.

Keep in mind that in the majority of cases, it is not the regeneration level of the facial nerve that leads to visual facial asymmetry. Instead, it is a wrongly formed new mimetic habits. We will be addressing that issue as well.

Excessive lacrimation or “crocodile tears” is a phenomenon that, from our point of view, results from a disrupted function of a tiny muscle that opens and closes a tear-sack in the inner corner of the eye.

A synkinetic correlation is formed between that muscle, the muscles of the mouth, the muscle that opens the lower jaw and perhaps also the gustatory sensors of the tongue. As a result, when you eat, your tear-sack sporadically opens, releasing the tears.

In the course of a rehabilitation program, this phenomenon reduces its manifestation substantially or even disappears altogether.

Among other issues, we can name headaches, tension and pain in the neck and shoulder on the affected side, tinnitus (perceived constant buzzing in the affected ear), deeper nasolabial fold and dimples in the chin on the affected side.

All these symptoms are quite typical for patients after a long recovery from Bell’s palsy, Ramsay Hunt Syndrome and other types of peripheral facial paralysis.

All these issues substantially reduce or may even disappear altogether during rehabilitation programs, as your brain “learns” not to overdo the contraction signals and to remain “silent” unless you need to change the facial expression, eat or speak.

Tinnitus, in particular, happens due to excessive tension of the smallest muscle in our body – the stapedius muscle. This muscle can tense up involuntarily, deform your eardrum, and you perceive a sound, even though it is not there.

This symptom usually decreases noticeably or even disappears altogether in the course of a full rehabilitation program.