The Hazards of a Bite out of Balance
If your teeth meet imperfectly, your chewing muscles stay active twenty four hours a day, seven days a week.
When our teeth meet food, nerves along the roots of those teeth signal resistance to closing while the nerves on all the other teeth are quiet. This uneven message triggers our muscles to start chewing.
After the food is thoroughly chewed and the jaws come together, all the teeth meet at the same time. With the uneven message gone, the chewing muscles relax.
If our bite is uneven when our teeth come together, the same uneven message goes out to the chewing muscles and they often stay active twenty four hours a day, seven days a week.
The forces of our chewing muscles are designed to chew up food. These muscles generate excessive force when they are active in the absence of food. The energy of this excessive force must be dissipated some how. The question is, where do Excessive Forces go?
Where do Excessive Forces go?
They cause premature wear of teeth and of dental restorations. They contribute to teeth cracking and fracturing, and contribute to dental restorations breaking and failing.
They lead to a loss of calcium at the root margins of teeth, leading to deep notches often blamed on ‘brushing too hard’.
They lead to receding gums, also often blamed on ‘brushing too hard’.But if brushing too hard caused recession, it would show up evenly as most people brush the same everywhere. And people with gum recession tend to have it just ‘here and there’.
They can cause teeth to loosen in their sockets, leading to early tooth loss.
They can cause gum pockets to form in the mouth of a person who, otherwise, doesn’t have any signs of gum disease.
They can cause teeth to shift position.
They can cause severe pain in the region in front of the ear, owing to inflamed jaw-joint muscles.
They can cause the upper jaw to develop ‘superbone’, a condition where the bone grows horizontally out towards the cheek.
They can cause pain, either felt in a tooth or referred to the head as headache.
They can lead to a dislocation of the jaw hinge disc, causing clicking and popping in early stages and pain and limited ability to open in late stages.
They can lead to sinus pain, sinusitis, or post-nasal drip unexplainable by allergies, irritants or headcolds.
They can lead to uneven pressures on the cranial bones of the skull, resulting in migraine pain and cognitive problems
They can lead to chronic alignment problems of the upper spine, resulting in a constant need for chiropractic adjustments.
They can lead to uneven stimulation of acupuncture points.
