Context The issue of pharmacotherapy safety in treating musculoskeletal pain, has brought attention to topical application, a safe and still effective route of drug delivery. Evidence Acquisition This review focuses on the topical agents used in temporomandibular disorders (TMDs). An advanced search of publications starting from 1980 through 2016 was made in ScienceDirect, PubMed, Medline, and Google Scholar databases using different combinations of keywords ("topical medication" OR "topical therapeutic" OR "topical pharmacotherapeutic agent" OR "topical analgesic") AND ("temporomandibular joint" OR "temporomandibular disorder" OR "temporomandibular joint dysfunction" OR "temporomandibular joint pain"). The relevance of searched articles to topical pharmacotherapy of temporomandibular joint disorders was considered and the following eligibility criteria were implied: 1) original articles; 2) English-language articles; and 3) full-text articles. TMDs are recently classified as muscle disorders, disc displacements, arthralgia, osteoarthritis and osteoarthrosis (1). TMDs are the most common musculoskeletal condition after chronic low back pain (2). The TMJ pain may be resulted from sensitization of trigeminal sensory neurons innervating the TMJ region (3). A patient with TMD may also have a pain complaint in the neck, shoulder or upper neck region (4). As for other musculoskeletal disorders, pharmacotherapy may be