Yes. Let me give an analogy, think of your teeth as a glass window. You have a glass window, a piece of glass, and then you can have a very minor hairline crack on it. But if you keep on hitting that piece of glass, that minor hairline crack will get bigger and bigger and it’ll split in whichever way. It could split to the left, it could split to the right, it could crack all over the place if you hit that piece of glass hard enough.
So it’s like that for teeth as well. You can have a small hairline crack on the tooth that doesn’t give you any pain in the beginning, but if you keep on biting on it, if you keep on pounding on it and chewing on it, that small crack will slowly give way to a bigger and deeper crack. And one fine day when you’re eating that piece of popcorn, that whole tooth can shatter.
As dentists, we’re trained to actually look out for these small cracks and to advise our patients to reinforce the tooth, perhaps seal the crack or do a filling. Some kind of reinforcement to prevent the tooth from deteriorating even further, even though the small minor trauma to the tooth might not be giving you any pain in the beginning.
