The Doctor Will Google You Now. 

While we chat over coffee… 

A friend of mine went to her GP with TMJ disorder because she had been advised to do this by her dentist. She was in pain, eating was difficult and she was asking for help. 

You may not immediately know what TMJ disorder is, but the doctor should have. 

She was surprised that he had to go to Google for a description of cause and symptoms, before he discussed pain relief. I was not so surprised, but I decided on a simple experiment. 

Two days later I had lunch with some herbalist friends, and I just flung out the random question to them over coffee and cake without warning or any prep; 

‘What is TMJ disorder, and what are the symptoms?’ 

Then without skipping a beat or asking why, it was bang, bang, bang…. 

Jaw pain or tenderness/ Difficulty chewing or discomfort while eating/ Clicking, popping, or grating sounds/ Limited jaw movement and it may lock in one position/ Possibly pain around the ear/ (tinnitus)/ Headaches/ sometimes dull and aching facial pain. 

Not said as a list obviously but clearly enunciated between each mouthful. No googling. 

And this is from mere herbalists, who are so far down the medical pecking order that most people don’t know we exist. And if they do, they are often warned against us because we don’t receive the same sort of training as doctors. 

My herbalist friends didn’t just know the cause and symptom pattern of temporomandibular joint disorder, they also had a clear idea of how they would approach it. 

I’m not sharing this story to bash doctors. I know they’re overworked, underpaid, and dealing with an impossible system. Medical training can’t possibly cover everything in depth, and GPs see such a vast range of conditions that some specialisation and reliance on resources is inevitable. But this moment crystallised something I’ve been thinking about for years: there’s a fundamental difference in how herbalists and conventional doctors are taught to understand the body. 

When my friend’s GP reached for Google, he was looking for a diagnosis to match symptoms to a treatment protocol. It’s a linear process: identify the condition, prescribe the intervention. In this case, pain relief. Job done. Next patient. 

But when I asked my herbalist colleagues about TMJ, their minds didn’t just catalogue symptoms. They were already thinking about inflammation, stress patterns, muscular tension, nutritional deficiencies that might affect connective tissue, how sleep positions and teeth grinding connect to anxiety and cortisol levels. They were seeing a person, not just a joint. 

This is the heart of what herbalism teaches: the body is an interconnected system, and symptoms are the body’s way of telling a story. TMJ disorder isn’t just about a malfunctioning hinge in the jaw. It’s often about chronic stress manifesting as bruxism, magnesium depletion affecting muscle relaxation, inflammation affecting the joint, poor posture from desk work, or even digestive issues that create tension patterns through the body. 

My herbalist friends would approach TMJ with anti-inflammatory herbs like turmeric or meadowsweet, nervines to address the stress component [perhaps skullcap or passionflower] magnesium supplementation, possibly external applications of warming oils with herbs like St John’s wort for the muscular tension, and importantly, they’d spend time understanding what’s happening in this person’s life that might be contributing to the jaw clenching in the first place. 

None of this is to say that herbalism is always better than conventional medicine. Modern medicine is miraculous in acute care, in surgery, in managing serious disease. I’m grateful it exists. But somewhere along the way, we’ve created a healthcare system where the people with the most medical authority often have the least time and training to look at the whole person. Meanwhile, the practitioners who do take that holistic view; herbalists, acupuncturists, massage therapists, are dismissed as fringe, unscientific, even dangerous. 

The irony isn’t lost on me. Patients are warned against herbalists because we lack the ‘proper training’ that doctors receive. Yet my friend’s doctor didn’t know what TMJ was without Google, while my colleagues could have taught a seminar on it between courses. 

Perhaps it’s time to ask ourselves: what kind of training serves patients best? And why are we so determined to keep different forms of knowledge in separate, hierarchical boxes instead of recognising that healthcare is big enough, complex enough, for multiple valid approaches? 

My friend eventually found relief, by the way. Not from her GP’s painkillers alone, but from a combination of dental work, stress management, and yes, some herbal support. Because sometimes the best medicine isn’t about who’s at the top of the pecking order. It’s about who actually knows what they’re looking at.