One patient who Dr. James Olsen remembers most vividly could barely manage the walk from the waiting room to the exam chair during her first appointment. She was a young mother, recovering from a car accident, whose world had shrunk to the two hours a day she could stand to be out of bed. There were headaches and dizziness, numbness in her arms, and her neck never stopped hurting. Specialists had scanned, tested, adjusted, and prescribed. No one could quite say what was wrong.
“She told me every doctor thinks she’s crazy,” Olsen recalls. “But her pain was very real. I mean, she couldn’t raise her kids, could barely get out of bed.”
By the end of her first appointment with Olsen, something shifted. After a session of neuromuscular TENS therapy and the placement of a device in her mouth, “she got up and walked down the long hallway into the waiting room, tall and more pain-free than she had been in months,” he says. Her husband stood up, stunned. “She’s crying, he’s crying, we’re all crying.”
It was one of his first advanced TMJ disorder cases when he had recently opened his dentistry practice more than 20 years ago. Seeing firsthand the relief he was able to provide sparked a passion.
“She got her life back,” Olsen said. “It was amazing to see. Talk about getting hooked.”
Since then, he’s built a dental practice in Ann Arbor that specializes in people whose lives have been rerouted by pain: migraine sufferers who can’t make it through a workday, singers who can no longer sing, professionals who can barely talk on Zoom without their jaw locking.
“I am focusing my practice on TMJ and Invisalign,” he says, though the route there wasn’t always the plan. When he graduated from the University of Michigan’s dental school in 1988, he was drawn to the new frontier of cosmetic dentistry. “My vision was to have a high-end cosmetic practice, because that was the dawn of the cosmetic dentistry age,” he says. He wanted to do “really quality aesthetic work”—the kind of full-mouth reconstructions that could transform a smile in a single visit.
The problem was that many of the people who wanted perfect smiles also had chipped and broken teeth from grinding, clenching, and misaligned bites. “We had to solve that, or the new stuff was going to break as well,” Olsen says. Digging into the mechanics of the jaw led him into the world of TMJ dysfunction and chronic pain, and he never looked back.
TMJ, in Olsen’s telling, is less a single diagnosis than a cascade. “TMJ dysfunction can present as simple muscle soreness and limited opening of the jaw,” he says, “all the way to trigeminal neuralgia [shooting pains in the face], and closed lock, where they can’t open their mouth at all.” Often there are “severe and frequent headaches, stuffiness of the ears. Even vertigo and tinnitus.”
For many patients, it starts as a constant low-level pain, which then bubbles up to be quite disabling.
“People reach a tipping point,” Olsen says, “All hell breaks loose, basically, and we have to dial it back.”
His approach is time and attention, first, and technology second. “From my perspective, the tears we get from patients come from really listening,” he says. “I work hard to be a good listener for people. And I think that’s the unusual thing that people find in our office. We take a lot of extra time to just take it all in. And patients bring everything to us, and we sort it out for them and find solutions.”
This highly personal work happens in a setting that’s also deeply local. Olsen grew up in Ann Arbor, left briefly for Traverse City, and came right back when he had kids. “There isn’t any other city in Michigan that offers families what Ann Arbor does, in terms of opportunity and atmosphere,” he says. “It is something special.”
What he’s built on the west side of Ann Arbor is, in many ways, a classic neighborhood practice: family-oriented, patient-centered, the kind of office where staff know your kids’ names (and your football allegiances). The difference is that woven through the cleanings and crowns are people arriving with years of accumulated pain, hoping this is the place where someone finally listens long enough, and knows enough, to help.
And in Ann Arbor, those stories don’t stay in the exam room. Olsen runs into former patients on Main Street in the summer, at football games in the fall, and, most predictably, in the aisles at Meijer. “My wife jokes that I’m the mayor of Meijer,” he says. “It takes us three times as long to shop as it probably should.”
Olsen still does cosmetic dentistry, still straightens teeth. But the stories that make him most excited now are the ones that begin in that long hallway between the waiting room and the chair: the patients who arrive exhausted, skeptical, a little desperate—and the ones who walk back down it, crying with relief, feeling, maybe for the first time in years, like themselves.
Learn more at jamesolsendds.com.
"From my perspective, the tears we get from patients come from really listening. I work hard to be a good listener for people. And I think that’s the unusual thing that people find in our office. We take a lot of extra time to just take it all in. And patients bring everything to us, and we sort it out for them and find solutions."