What's actually causing this pain?
Well, we get this question almost every single day. a couple of times a day, as a matter of fact. Look, to talk about what causes teeth to hurt, I can probably narrow it down to three causes,
first being teeth, second being gums, third being other factors, other external factors like could be muscles, could be bones, could be all sorts of other things.
Now let's talk about the key factors. Now, teeth could hurt due to, you know, broken teeth, cracks just to name a few. But the topic of cracks itself is a big topic, but just to give you a quick summary, cracks are one of the most complex things to pick up.
X-rays are very hard to pick up cracks, almost impossible in some cases.
And there are other treatment modalities that we can use to pick up cracks. But I guess, cracks itself has a couple of general factors of why it happened in the first place, well, the first being trauma. If you get bumped in the face, get hit in the face or punched in the face, of course, things can, you know, sometimes teeth might crack. At least you hope that's the only thing that cracks.
Then there's other things like metal fillings. Now, metal fillings, the why, we stopped doing that up to about 10 years ago, approximately is because we found that, look 20, 30 years ago, they didn't know any better, but we found it right now after 20, 30 years, we found that with metal fillings, they expand and contract with temperature, and if you think about it, you have food every single day having hot, cold, hot, cold, hot, cold and expands and contracts, expands and contracts to the point where if you put a tooth in the middle of, if you put a filling, a metal thing in the middle of tooth,
If it expands it actually cracks the teeth and around it. So it's pretty common that we see teeth with metal fillings have some form of cracks on it.
Now there's also, you know, other factors like large fillings. Studies have shown that if a filling is sometimes half or more than half the size of a tooth there, it's more likely to break over time, it's more likely to crack. Because if you think about it, larger the filling, the lesser the tooth structure there is, and the lesser the tooth structure it is, the more brittle the teeth are, and that means that they are more prone to breaking. Another bean grinding, you know, in my previous videos or in my next video, we talked about grinding, and if you think about it, grinding you know, your teeth rubbing against each other all the time. Obviously that's going to break something.
There's the other pain, you know, a dead tooth or weakened out tooth. When the nerves' been taken down that will sort of weaken the tooth structurally and internally, and that is more prone to breaking too.
Another pain which happens quite often, but you don't hear about it much is the position of teeth. So I'd like to say, if you think about it, it's like, if you've got a tooth that sticks out a lot more than usual, and it's slamming onto the bottom all the time, eventually that tooth is going to wear down a lot quicker than the other teeth, or you're going to end up with a little defect or a little hole on the inside.
So those are the general factors of what might cause cracks in teeth factors and causing pain in your teeth.
There are other factors like gums, you know. Gums are like gum disease, and one of the many signs is if you're brushing your teeth, you start seeing blood come out from the gums and you spit out your toothpaste with blood in it. I know you like to say, it's like when you wash your hands, you know, if you're washing your hands, and you start seeing blood come up from under the nails, you know something's not right. It's the same thing as brushing your teeth, when you're brushing your teeth, you start seeing blood come out and you know, something's not right there. And those gum issues can cause pain and sensitivity as well.
Of course, trauma like for example, popcorn kernels or any types of food, getting jammed in the gums, of course that's going to cause some sort of pain. And there are other factors like are the factors, which are not necessarily gum or teeth related. You know, some are neurological issues and nerve issues as well.
There's muscle issues, there's grinding that can cause it too, I did mention that earlier. There's also, you know, things like growth in bones and stuff, which are pretty rare, but those things can cause pain. Another one that I see quite commonly actually sinus issues. Actually just lately, you know, we had a few patients come in with, we had some cold and with the cold symptoms, they have a bit of discharge, they have blocked ears, and at the same time pain across the top too. So those are the, you know, those are the things that, I suppose by seeing a local professional, we can actually work out or eliminate one or the other causes and actually get them to actually what's causing it, because without finding out, again, without finding out what the cause of the problem is, we can't fix it.
And I'm always a big fan, I always say this, it's not about, as much as we love all the medical and dental professionals love fixing the problem, we're more interested in fixing the cause. Cause if we are only fixing the problem and not addressing the cause, what will happen is as long as the cause is still there, the problem is going to keep occurring over and over and over and over again, it's not going to go away. And to know exactly what the cause is, seek help from your local professional. Well thank you for your time, and I hope this video has helped you in some way or form and until the next video. Bye now!
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