Semidey Dental Podcast

EP #6: Navigating Bite Balance for Better Health

• Alex Semidey • Season 1 • Episode 6

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Unlock the secrets to a harmonious smile as we team up with Dr. Alex Semide to trace the connections between dental occlusion and your overall health. Dr. Alex, armed with a wealth of knowledge, helps us understand the intricate puzzle of how our teeth should ideally fit together—a balance that influences everything from our appearance to the way we chew. Misalignment in our bite can be more troublesome than a rocky road trip; it can wreak havoc on our oral ecosystem, leading to uneven wear, pain, and a host of dental dilemmas. So buckle up and get ready to steer clear of the bumps on your dental journey with guidance from a true maestro of the mouth.

This episode isn't just about the mechanics of munching; it's a deep exploration into how the alignment of our pearly whites can impact our lives—the good, the bad, and the crunchy bits in between. With Dr. Alex at the helm, we navigate the consequences of crowded, gapped, or misaligned teeth, drawing parallels between the wear on your tires and the stress on your teeth. Whether you're biting back stress or savoring a steak, maintaining a proper bite is critical, and we're here to show you why. Tune in for a conversation that promises to leave you not just informed, but also empowered to take the wheel on the road to optimal oral well-being.

Jeremy:

Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of Word of Mouth, where we explore the fascinating connection between your oral health and your overall well-being. I am your co-host for the day, jeremy Wolf, joined by your host, dr Alex Semide. Dr Alex, good to see you here again so soon. Likewise, my good man. So we were just talking about mouth cancer, had some wonderful tidbits and pieces of wisdom for folks out there, and I thought a good topic of conversation now would be to talk a little bit about your bite in dentistry and why it's important. So, with that said, what is meant by your bite in dentistry and why is it important?

Dr. Alex Semidey:

All right. So let's sink our teeth into this, shall we? So what is your bite? I'm going to start off with a little bit of like dental nerd terminology here.

Jeremy:

Occlusion have you ever heard the term occlusion? I have heard occlusion, but if asked to define it, draw in a blank. Okay, cool.

Dr. Alex Semidey:

That's why I'm here. So occlusion is the term that we use in dentistry for how your teeth fit together. All right, your teeth are meant to fit together like a puzzle. I always explain it like it like two gears right, like the cogs, and two gears kind of interlacing and working seamlessly with each other. Right Now, that is the case when our maxilla, which is our top jaw, and our mandible, which is our bottom jaw, develop normally and all of the teeth have space and room and are aligned and that way they get to fit together the right way.

Dr. Alex Semidey:

Okay, we've talked about in previous episodes reasons for our jawbones not developing all the way right. These things can carry on from, like childhood into adulthood. Habits and dietary habits and genetics of course, all sorts of different factors play into this scenario. Right, the setup of our teeth. Now, anything that deviates from this ideal setup that we were just talking about, we call malocclusion right. So it's like occlusion. That ain't quite what it should be. Right Now, this can be crowding, which everyone knows about. This can be like big gaps in your teeth. This can be over bites and under bites and and you know all of those things. Ok, now some some overbite. Right Is is a good thing, like we don't want our teeth Right.

Dr. Alex Semidey:

Think about those gears again, right? They kind of interlace. If those cogs were to hit edge to edge, those gears would break down pretty quickly, right? So sometimes folks think, oh, my teeth should be hitting on top of each other for my teeth to be set up, right. No, there's kind of an overlap and a certain way that things need to be distributed. Okay, now what happens when things aren't lined up properly? Right, let's talk about alignment in general and let's talk about the tires on your car. What happens when your tires aren't aligned properly?

Jeremy:

Okay, what happens when my tires aren't aligned properly? The car will not drive straight, I'd imagine.

Dr. Alex Semidey:

Yeah, it wobbles, right, like the driving experience is impacted, but your tires are going to wear unevenly, right, because they're not all facing the same direction, they're not all balanced the same way. So you end up getting bald spots on a tire earlier than you should. You may have like to replace your tires sooner, and it's all because of the alignment of the tires. Now, with your teeth, like the same sort of thing happens. If things aren't aligned properly and your bite isn't set the right way now we're going to start putting excess force and pressure in certain spots more than others. Right, in certain spots more than others, right. So those teeth end up with like these traumatic bites where every time that we talk and chew and clench and grind because our boss is like pissing us off and like we're gnashing on our teeth, like now, instead of like all of our teeth absorbing all that pressure, we have certain teeth that are suffering more than others and we call that a traumatic bite.

Dr. Alex Semidey:

Right Now, what can happen from that traumatic bite? We can wear teeth down. We can fracture teeth literally like split them in half like a log right where they need to be removed. We can crack them. We can lead to to to pain. We have issues like actually chewing our food properly. Right, it goes downstream. So if you can't chew your food properly because your teeth aren't meeting the right way, that can lead to digestive issues. Right, because your stomach is having to pick up that load that that your teeth should be, that function that your teeth should be carrying out right. So it really does play a huge role in the overall stability of someone's oral health to have a proper bite where all of those forces are distributed and long-term gastrointestinal issues gastrointestinal issues.

Jeremy:

Are there any other issues that can come from having issues with your bite in terms of other areas of your body besides digestion?

Dr. Alex Semidey:

Most of those. Yeah, absolutely, tmj is the big one that comes to mind. That's lockjaw, isn't it? That's that one of the kind of TMJ is kind of like an umbrella term for things that aren't quite right with your temporal mandibular joint, with your jaw joint, and lockjaw can happen. That's one of the symptoms that you can experience if you do have some sort of issue with your TMJ. It can be jaw pain. It can be jaw pain, right, it can be difficulty, like you said, locked jaw, even if it's not totally locked, but a decreased range of motion, jaw like muscle fatigue and a lot of people will wake up in the morning feeling like they've been chewing gum all night, right, and it's because they've been clenching or grinding. And malocclusion can be one of the risk factors for clenching and grinding, because your mouth can't find a nice stable position to sort of rest in right, so you're constantly like struggling to find a proper place for your jaws to kind of rest against each other proper place for your jaws to kind of rest against each other.

Jeremy:

So what are some common signs that indicate there could be a problem with the bite? And how does that, I guess, change? Because I have kids and they're getting braces now. So I'd imagine that for a lot of people these issues are addressed at youth, but for somebody that maybe hasn't addressed at youth, is there a point where it becomes too far gone to fix. How does that work? What is the? I don't know? I guess kind of talk a little bit about that.

Dr. Alex Semidey:

Yeah.

Dr. Alex Semidey:

I mean like with everything, the sooner we catch things, the easier it is to fix.

Dr. Alex Semidey:

And malocclusion is generally a much more straightforward problem to solve with kids because their bones are much softer.

Dr. Alex Semidey:

You get to move things around a lot easier. Yeah, um, so definitely, if we see early on there's one of these like jawbone development issues, the sooner we catch that and we use expanders and and you know headgear and things like that, right, when, when folks back in the day had the headgear and they looked like they were picking up you know AM, fm signals, that was moving and expanding the palate or the jawbone in order to accommodate and have it expand to have enough room for teeth to settle the bite. So the earlier things are picked up, obviously, the easier it is as we get into adulthood. Orthodontics still work very, very well, but it isn't as impactful as it is with kids, right, you know, whether it's fixed appliances like the traditional braces, right brackets and wires bonded to your teeth, or clear aligners like Invisalign or ClearCorrect, we have great options to correct a lot of these problems and ultimately improve the occlusion to make it more stable and hopefully, you know, avoid all of these issues down the line.

Jeremy:

So, aside from traditional braces or Invisalign, which I'd imagine is probably more prevalent for adults that are trying to correct their teeth, are there any other things that can be done? Are there any other treatment options out there that anybody should know about?

Dr. Alex Semidey:

There are some other appliances that are sometimes utilized, of occlusion issues right and and solving them in a way that's that's that's predictable and comfortable and, and you know, accessible to patients. Sometimes, like I said, there's other appliances gear expanders that need to be brought into the, brought into the mix, but with, with traditional orthodontics and clear aligners we can fix, like I said, 99% of occlusal issues.

Jeremy:

Are there any, I guess, misconceptions or myths that you run into concerning the importance of your bite that you'd like to address, Maybe something that you've heard from a?

Dr. Alex Semidey:

patient. What type of things are you hearing? The number one thing is really, like people feel and and think that straight teeth are for good looks, you know? And uh, yes, yes, straight teeth are more attractive, no doubt about it. Um, there's all sorts of studies as to, you know, the psychological impact that that, that it has to meet someone that has an attractive smile versus a non-attractive smile, like, we actually perceive them as being more competent, right, like you think someone with a good smile is, just by meeting them, might be smarter than someone without a good smile. It's bizarre, but that's what the literature shows.

Dr. Alex Semidey:

But, yeah, all the time we have these conversations with people at the office and what we hear is I thought straightening my teeth was just for it to look better. Right, they didn't understand the profound impact that it was going to have on their oral health, right? Just think about this if you have a bunch of teeth that are, you know, really crowded and difficult to get in between, is that going to be easier or harder to keep clean and keep those gums healthy and keep those teeth healthy, as opposed to teeth that are lined up and accessible to your toothbrush and floss? Right, it's a no-brainer, right? The straighter things are, the easier you can take care of them right, the cleaner you're going to be able to keep your mouth, the fresher your breath is going to be, and the better and more stable your bite will be, so that you don't run into these other issues down the line.

Jeremy:

Yeah, for sure, and I can. I can speak to that to some degree because, as you know, I have three fake teeth over here and flossing under there. I have to have that little. I forgot what it's called, the little floss thing.

Dr. Alex Semidey:

What is it called?

Jeremy:

Floss threader. A threader, there you go. That's the word I'm looking for, and every night I got to put the threader through and do the whole thing.

Dr. Alex Semidey:

So it just makes it a little bit more, you should try super floss, super floss.

Dr. Alex Semidey:

Yeah, try super floss. I don't know what. It is a great tool for folks. Cooper floss is a piece of floss it's about 18 inches long and the first like three or four inches are waxed, so it's firm, it's soft but firm. And then the next segment of the floss is thicker and kind of rope here, so you use the waxed portion to get under, in your case your bridge, so you can just. It's harder, so you can just thread it through without the feather. Ah man.

Dr. Alex Semidey:

It's a really, it's a really neat little little gadget and for bridges, I recommend them all the time.

Jeremy:

All right. Well, I'm definitely going to get myself some super floss, no doubt. There you go.

Dr. Alex Semidey:

All right and anything else I expect some sort of cut out of this promo for the Super Flows.

Jeremy:

Absolutely, brother, absolutely, and anything else you want to touch on before we wrap this one up.

Dr. Alex Semidey:

Yeah, absolutely. So a couple of key points that I wanted to make. For folks that are, you know, wondering about their bite and, you know, curious as to whether or not it's something that should be looked into a little bit further. We do offer complimentary consultations for orthodontic treatment at the office. All of our contact info will be below. Just reach out either on social or give us a call and we'll get you in. We can have a conversation. We'll actually analyze your occlusion digitally and you'll be able to see if you do have any problem areas and then we'll discuss what we can do about it.

Jeremy:

All right, sounds good, my man. Always a pleasure. Thanks as always to our listeners for tuning in and we will catch everyone next time, on the next episode of Word of Mouth. Keep smiling, folks. All right, everyone, take care, have a great day. Thank you for joining us on word of mouth. Remember a healthy smile is a reflection of your wellbeing. Until next time, keep smiling and caring for your dental health. We'll be back soon with more dental insights.