I'm not sure - many,many years before my tmj started - I had just gotten a 4-unit bridge for my 4 upper front teeth - I developed ear pain shortly thereafter. It went on for more than a year and I went to several ENTs - I had dizziness all the time but my employer had just moved to a new office building and I was located on the 5th floor and had to take an elevator to come and go,etc - so they kept telling me nothing was wrong or that my body would adapt to using the elevator - I even had xrays of my head done but they did not find a cyst or anything out of the norm - so I kept taking Antivert and using heating pads and taking Aleve for several weeks at a time. One day out of the blue - I bent down to pick up a box and my neck cracked and then proceeded to make a zipper sound - pop, pop, pop and around my neck it went. I freaked out - didn't know what happened - but suddenly realized my ear ache was gone as well as the dizziness! I am not sure if my neck was out of alignment - maybe b/c of the new bridge? and if it was, did it even have anything to do with the ear ache - or was all of this due to tmj? I will probably never know. Although I had occasional ear ringing - that never really b/c bothersome until the tmj went into high drive- but luckily it is gone now - chiro treatments finally put an end to it.

As one dentist told me - we all have a degree of tmj - and the body can usually adjust itself and handle it - but when things become so out of balance that the muscles can no longer funtcion is when tmj becomes painful. So its possble you could have tmj and only have your ears affected - but it could also be due to your cervical spine as well. The neck, jaw, head and face are so intermingled in terms of function and using the same muscles and nerves its easy to see why an accurate diagnosis is hard to come by.