Forty years at the
joint.

Dr. Mark Piper spent forty years operating microscopically on the temporomandibular joint and imaging it with CT and MR. His practice was devoted to the most complicated patients in the field: those whose problems had not been explained, and those whose treatment had failed. He documented every case by imaging, and he compared the joint he found at surgery and on the scans with the bite, the facial skeleton and the airway of the patient who owned it.

From that work came the concepts he teaches today. The Piper Classification stages the joint by the condition of its disc, ligaments and bone. His MR protocol images the joint in four recorded occlusal positions. He developed techniques for microscopic disc repair, and for fat grafting to support the condyle when the disc cannot be saved. With Dr. Peter Dawson he developed Joint Based Occlusion and Joint Based Malocclusion, and from there originated and defined Joint Based Dentistry, the discipline that accounts for childhood growth, adult degeneration and internal derangement as causes of bite, skeletal and airway distortion.

He was one of twelve founding members of the American Society of TMJ Surgeons in 1986, and has received lifetime achievement awards from the Dawson Academy and the American Equilibration Society. With his son he developed the Anomalous Medical model, which he used with thousands of patients to show them what their scans revealed.