Chronic facial pain: a clinical approach.

Facial pain is a common presenting complaint requiring patience and diagnostic acumen. The proliferation of eponyms attached to various syndromes complicates the subject. The most frequent cause of pain is likely to be muscle spasm in masticatory or temporalis muscles. This article presents a rank order for the common causes of facial pain that present diagnostic difficulty, such as temporomandibular joint pain, trigeminal neuralgia, giant cell arteritis, and post-herpetic neuralgia.