Have you watched a jaw surgery video on Youtube? Jaw surgery is hard on the face. The trauma alone can damage the joints. Worse yet, after jaw surgery the muscles and bones all need to adapt to the new structural reality. Remodeling in other words! People with dysfunctional joints are at higher risk for dysfunctional remodeling. 80% of such patients relapse according to the paper as I recall. Hence the strong desire to pursue treatments for joint problems. I haven't seen the papers from Dr Arnett, I'm curious what kind of results the pharmaceutical approach gives but Dr Wolford has pursued a surgical approach. A prosthodontist I've been consulting first checked for TMJ problems and when I was clean, he gave a sigh of relief and said "good, that means we have options!". Dr Wolford strongly recommends stabilizing the joint first before jaw surgery for this reason and his papers show a high success rate in these cases. His negative reputation comes from those that fail or where the joint repair fails, which sadly happens often I think despite successful jaw surgery. Maybe he's planning on looking at reversible joint surgeries next, I don't know.
I'm just glad that I don't have joint problems. The odds are still 20% of developing problems post surgery, though I suspect a large portion of that are people with established or silent problems.
