How do you lose dental height (vertical)?
The biomechanical collapse process I talk about is a function of losing 'vertical' in the mouth by grinding and other means that I explain here
Now long ago someone said to me… “Ken I don’t think you’re right because I don’t grind my teeth.”
So I asked to look at their teeth and their cusps were obviously quite a bit ground down.
Which they explained by saying that a decade back they were grinding their teeth quite a bit.
And so I asked when their symptoms started.
Their response was over a period of at least five years and perhaps more.
I looked at them with that “ummm you just answered your own question” look.
Most people were grinding their teeth at some point
I was grinding my teeth a lot in my early 20’s. This is when I had a lot of my muscle tightness begin in areas like my back and neck.
However by my mid-20’s and onwards I do not remember grinding my teeth much at all. Perhaps it happened a bit when i was sleeping, but I was not conscious of it.
The damage had been already done however. And so my muscle tightness issues only got worse through my later 20’s and 30’s.
And from listening to various people’s stories over the years this is often how it works. You grinded your teeth earlier in life and then the issues became more obvious years later.
Even if you’re not grinding your teeth there is normal wear & tear
Also, you don’t need to be ‘grinding’ your teeth to lose dental height.
The ‘Inuit’ tribe in Alaska was mentioned by Weston Price years ago to have ground their teeth down considerably during life because of their diet. They ate meats that required a lot of hard chewing.
Now if you’re a logic person you might thinking to yourself… “well if the Inuit grind down their teeth than why do their faces look so healthy and full up above despite this?”
And to this i’d say that what matters is absolute dental height and structural quality of the entire dental arch. Not just whether you lost a tooth or two.
And looking at their faces, I would say that probably the other thing they have going for them is that they have wide dental arches and still likely have their wisdom teeth. Whereas in most western societies these days the wisdom teeth are removed because there isn’t enough space (ie. the dental arches never developed sufficiently to create space for them).
There are other ways to lose ‘vertical’ besides grinding
You don’t lose ‘vertical dimension’ in your mouth just by grinding your teeth because there are other ways:
1: Your teeth may not have ever properly extruded to begin with.
Many kids these days are mouth breathers and poor sleepers exactly because the teeth never properly extruded.
2: Changing the structure of your mouth via orthodontics (eg. braces, invisalign, extractions) will expedite the rate by which you lose dental height.
Why? Because you have changed how your teeth come together unnaturally… forgetting that teeth were designed and shaped by the physics of your mouth over a long period of time.
If you move them, you are highly likely to trigger a consequence in which you grind down your teeth much faster and the teeth continue to move and bend.
3: Expansion of the dental arches
When you force the dental arches wider (eg. braces) you are essentially loosing vertical dimension.
Just imagine taking an arch and flattening it… there will be less vertical height of the arch. That is just physics.
And this is why so many people that did expansion via invisalign and braces pay a big price in the ensuing decades.
Wrapping up
The biomechanics I talk about in this blog are based on maintaining a certain ‘vertical’ height in the mouth because this kind of acts as a ‘door jam’ between the skull and the jaw.
As this ‘vertical’ decreases this is what causes the ‘deflating balloon’ effect on the skull that I talk about in this article.
And therefore you want to maintain vertical in the mouth as best you can, or even increase it.
Maintaining it is a function of keeping your teeth healthy and not grinding them down. Whereas to increase it, you can use any of these methods I talk about here.
If I’m not mistaken, Myobrace also expands the dental arch. Will it also cause losing vertical height?