I was undone by a giant bag of Cool Ranch Doritos. I was twenty-three and—as I was prone to doing in those years—hadn’t eaten anything all day. When I arrived at the downtown hotel room where a friend was hosting a birthday party, the tangy chips beckoned. I crunched on them by the fistful. But by the time I’d emptied the bag, something felt terribly wrong. It wasn’t just my cheeks puckering from the acerbity. My jaw stiffened. My ears rang. What felt like an electric current seemed to be zapping through my face and down my neck.

I spent the rest of the night locked in the bathroom, ashamed that I’d eaten so many chips that I couldn’t move my mouth or speak. Days later, when I reported the incident to my family doctor, she didn’t examine my jaw or run a single test. “You have TMJ,” she said. I asked her what that was; she told me to google it and promptly left the exam room.

After scrolling through WebMD, I learned about temporomandibular disorders, or TMD. (TMJ is the acronym for the joint itself, while TMD refers to the disorders.) The term lumps together a set of conditions that cause pain or loss of function in the jaw joints and muscles. In a later appointment, I told my dentist that I still felt a lingering ache in my face. He proclaimed that I must be grinding my teeth at night; I had no reason to question his diagnosis.

The clinic ordered a night guard, a custom-fit plastic shell that cost around $400 and would do nothing to stop the grinding but would protect my tooth enamel while I slept. The first night I tried it out, I spent an hour staring at the ceiling, feeling the rigid plastic poking my gums. After the second hour, I popped the slimy device back in its case and shoved it in a drawer, never to be seen again.

The phrase “gnashing of teeth” appears seven times in the New Testament, typically describing the fate of those who have fallen out of God’s favour. In the Parable of the Weeds, Jesus describes separating the wheat from the weeds and throwing the latter into an inferno, “where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” For many people, teeth grinding can come with an array of hellish consequences: fractured teeth, eroded enamel, earaches, headaches, difficulty chewing food, or a jaw that gets locked in the open or closed position (like in the Dorito incident).

Some research suggests that about 30 percent of adults have TMD. A study this past June from Journal of Clinical Medicine projected that number would rise to 44 percent by 2050—though it’s not completely clear why. Sidney Lisser, a chiropractor and lead jaw clinician at the Jaw and Facial Pain Centre in Toronto, believes that more people are experiencing pain from grinding, but research is divided on whether bruxism and pain are correlated. He’s adamant that TMD should not be conflated with grinding: not all grinding leads to TMD; not all TMD is caused by grinding; and not all grinding is painful or needs........

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