What are teeth for? Most will say “chewing”. But consider this: you’re walking through the bush, you step over a log and suddenly there is a snake rearing angrily, as if it’s about to bite you. If it’s too small to eat you, why is it threatening to bite you? The answer is because it’s scared witless, terrified of you, and it’s getting ready to defend itself as part of the instinctive survival response known as fight or flight, or the acute stress response. So what’s the relationship between this sort of stress and our own teeth? The surprising answer is tooth-grinding.
Most dentists call tooth-gnashing or toothgrinding‘bruxism’,atermthatdoesn’t, unfortunately, explain anything about the reason why it occurs. In contrast, the term ‘thegosis’, first published in 1970 by New Zealand dentist Ron Every, is used by aware dentists and zoologists for the same process that occurs in many animals, including humans. Thegosis is a Greek word that means to sharpen or whet — in this case teeth, beaks or other interacting hard parts. These parts are ‘ground’ against
