Should you floss your teeth? That’s the question I have been asked a lot by my patients lately and that is likely due to the recent media coverage around a ground-breaking article by D. Walmsley, a professor of dentistry at Birmingham University, UK and a scientific advisor for The British Dental Association. In that article he states that while brushing one’s teeth is beneficial in reduction of caries and gingivitis, flossing is a non-essential extra and can be omitted.
All these years dentists have been trying to convince their patients to floss daily. The Canadian Dental Association backs it up as one of the basic principles of good oral health. Yet there is surprisingly little scientific evidence of that. On the contrary, several studies like the one from University of Amsterdam in 2008 and a later, 2011 review of research on the issue, conclude that flossing does not help reduce incidence of dental caries and there is no significant difference in gum health in people who brush and floss and the ones who just brush.
So.. TO FLOSS OR NOT TO FLOSS?
I say- floss. To me, it makes sense to remove plaque not only from the outer and inner surfaces of the teeth, but also from between them. I don’t know how accurate the studies were, but in my practice I can almost always tell the flosser from a non-flosser by the way the gums respond to simple scaling. I invariably get bleeding on inter-dental scaling in a patient who doesn’t floss of does it irregularly. And the bleeding means inflammation. And I don’t need studies to confirm it, because it’s evident.
Another issue is how to floss correctly. I teach my patients to insert the floss as gently as possible to avoid trauma to the gum tissue and wrap it like a towel around the tooth to scrape off the plaque accumulated on it’s side.
Depending on the shape of one’s teeth and their periodontal condition I recommend other interdental cleaning aids, such as Softpicks, Stimudents, Proxa-brushes, rubber tips etc. The choice is strictly personalized. A combination of the above is often needed. The patient’s manual dexterity and learning motivation/ability have to be taken in consideration.
Like with the brushing, it is my conviction, based on experience, that hands-on instructions and re-instructions are essential to get the patient draw the greatest benefit from flossing.
In conclusion, if you’re wondering to floss or not to floss, JUST DO IT!
But if you do it, then you might as well do it right and do it daily.
See you soon at The Little Green Building!
Michael Paltsev DDS
