TMJ causing numbness on side of face ?

I'm not sure if I have TMJ, I have a lot of the symptoms and I'm planning on seeing a specialist to see if I have it, but I was wondering if it's possible for TMJ to cause numbness in your face and mouth.

Just a little background, I've recently been noticing that the left side of my face is "puffier" than the other side and started doing some research, which led me to TMJ.

Since I was a kid I remember having a pop in my jaw when I opened my mouth really wide. It never caused any pain though so I thought nothing of it. Around junior high I got braces and wore them until about halfway through high school. The rest of high school, I wore a retainer at night. When I got to college though, I stopped wearing my retainer and although my teeth got a little crooked as a result, it wasn't too bad.

But around age 20 I got my wisdom teeth extracted and that's when I think it really happened. I got all 4 wisdom teeth taken out at the same time and immediately started having problems with the left side of my mouth. Within a few days of the extraction I got an infection where the left bottom wisdom tooth was taken out. It eventually healed but I noticed that the whole bottom left area of my mouth felt numb. I told the orthodontist about it and he said it happens sometimes and should go away after a few years.

Well I waited a few years and it never went away, but I guess I had kind of learned to live with it, or ignore it. I ignored it for almost ten years, until recently. For some reason, I really started to notice that the left side of my jaw was so different from the right. Looking at older pictures, I guess the basic uneven shape of my jaw was always there, but now it seems so much more pronounced.

The bottom left of my mouth is still numb. I press my tongue hard on that spot where my wisdom tooth was taken out and I can't really feel anything. The inside and outside of my cheek on that side always has that tingly numbness feeling and the skin on my face on that side is a lot looser and "stretchy" than the other side. And I can bite down hard on the left side of my tongue without any pain. The left side of my neck is also bigger and shaped differently from the right.

And in pictures, the left side of my face is so much bigger and lower set than the right, it almost looks like that side is melting off, or was injected with a super growth hormone. Granted, when I look in the mirror I can't really tell unless I really focus on it. And not many people notice it. Which is why I've ignored it for a year or two and self-remedied it by chewing on the right side of my mouth thinking that the jaw muscles on that side weren't getting enough of a workout, or by sleeping on my back thinking that sleeping on my side was deforming one side of my face somehow. I've even taken my wallet out of my right butt pocket and put it in my side pocket, thinking that leaning on one butt cheek was creating some of the problems.

But I've decided that my self-remedys are gonna be a losing battle because it's uncomfortable for me to just chew on the right side and only sleep on my back, so I'm trying to get to the root of the problem, which I think is TMJ. Anyway, sorry for writing so much but I'm kind of relieved that these symptoms that have bugged me for so long have a name and that they aren't just a natural part of the aging process like I was trying to convince myself they were.

I have a few questions though. With the symptoms I've described, is it possible to cure them with Invisalign or any other non-surgical method (other than braces)? And should I be going to a maxillofacial specialist for a diagnosis? I have two that I'm looking at right now, one is an MD and the other is a DDS. Which one would be better?

Thanks in advance and thanks for all the great info on this forum.