My partner says I grind my teeth at night. My jaw aches daily. What do I do?

Jaw clenching at night gets a liver-constraint reading, and a very ordinary dental one that comes first.

Two appointments, in this order. A dentist, because a night guard protects your teeth from wear and usually reduces the morning jaw ache, and because worn teeth and cracked fillings are measurable. And if the grinding is loud, comes with snoring, morning headaches, dry mouth or being unrefreshed despite a full night, look at sleep rather than teeth - bruxism is frequently tied to micro-arousals and to sleep-disordered breathing, and a sleep study is the test that answers it. Daytime habits matter more than people expect: jaw at rest means teeth slightly apart, tongue on the palate, no gum chewing, and no deliberate clench tests. Chinese medicine frames clenching with irritability, temporal headache and disturbed stress-related sleep as liver qi stagnation turning upward, which mostly translates into the same advice - reduce caffeine and alcohol late, get sleep regularity, and work the stress input rather than only the jaw. Gentle pressure on the masseter muscle in front of the ear for a minute or two is fine as self-care.

Qicura reads a described symptom against this kind of material and returns a pattern in plain language with the sources named. It does not dispense: no herb quantities, no formula composition, no preparation instructions, and no needling technique - those are deliberate limits enforced on the server, not wording we soften for a page.

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