“My daughter accidentally hit me pretty hard on the jaw. How long does that take to feel better? It clicks when I open my mouth and it hurts.”

-Belinda

Well, Belinda, your daughter seems to hold some pugilistic promise.

Congratulations.

First, do not try and make the jaw click. What you see people doing in movies, when they get hit in the chin, rolling their lower jaw around in such a way as it was not designed to work, that is asking to rip open a ligament or tendon that is only stressed or slightly swollen from the impact.

Second, if you normally eat anything that requires a lot of bite pressure to get going, like large hard pretzels that I ate in my 20s when I had my jaw ligaments torn, lay off that food. When Gabe slammed me in the jaw sparring, it was numb on the side he hit and knotted on the other side where the thing almost blew out from the pressure. Then, as I ate a hard pretzel that night, the first bite tore the ligaments in the jaw and I could not chew for something like a month. So avoid jerky for a while.

Third, use the jaw as evenly as possible, up and down, no rolling it a round.

Find out if either one of the hinge joints below and in front of the ear, are tender or swollen. If so, ice that joint and avoid chewing until the swelling and tenderness goes away. The jawbone itself is not a worry unless you were hit at high speed by a hard object, like a man's fist. If so, get a doctor or dentist to check it. Dentists are as good or better at diagnostics on the jaw than most doctors.

If you feel any kind of knot or lump or extreme pain at the mandible joint, do seek a medical opinion. However, immobilization is about all they do. If its bad, in the absence of surgery, just keep from chewing, speak narrowly in a whisper and eat with a straw or a turkey baster. My dentist helped me out with this, and even plucked the splintered bone and tooth fragments left over from a ten-year-old wisdom tooth extraction that was very sloppily done. Those slivers of tooth and bone migrated out through my gums into my mouth for a month or two after that thunderous bare-knuckle, overhand right.

To avoid jaw injuries, refrain from speaking to your daughter while she is swinging her little fists, keeping the mouth closed. As with many things, prevention is the best medicine.

In the early oughts I dated a savage little boxer who had had her jaw broken in fights with men twice. This chick was 105 and hit like a 150-pound man—but did not have the robust jaw necessary for such exchanges of bad intent. This is what did in the HMS Hood when she went after the Bismark in the North Atlantic. Cruisers might hit as hard as battleships, but they are not armored.

Not only did she refrain “from running my mouth while fighting men,” but she decided that she would more easily get her way with men by “dominating the oral sex portion of the relationship” up to include an actual superpower. Hence, she took a hooker friend's advice and began chewing gum, a lot. And, well while coaching in that sport is not something I had ever considered, she did dominate in impressive fashion. In fact, since she was so mean to me that I broke up with her about very other month for a couple of years, her “superpower” [her words] would regularly serve to sway me back into her sometimes cruel clutches. She would even crack her gum to remind me what I was missing.

Oh, that may have been inappropriate, so if your daughter is reading advise, that oral sex is an argument between two adults of the opposite sex. Also, let us remember, that the absolute best thing about Civilization is dentistry.

So, in support of toothed humanity, beginning around 2003, I have advised that competitive boxers chew gum to strengthen their jaw.