Posted on 06/01/2015 5:25:47 PM PDT by rickmichaels
My dental health is something I have always taken seriously — and as a gadget fan, I’ve spent hundreds of pounds on the latest high-tech electronic toothbrushes and expensive toothpastes, gels and mouthwashes.
But then I had to go without brushing my teeth for a fortnight.
This was for a new two-part series on dental health for the BBC, and what we discovered was truly eye-opening, with implications not just for me, but for all of us.
My wife was anything but keen on the no-brushing experiment and there was a lot less kissing during that fortnight. And she was right to be worried about the outcome.
For two weeks, I wore a gum guard on one side of my mouth whenever I brushed my teeth, so that side didn’t get cleaned.
At the end of this time, I brushed my teeth without the gum guard on and my gums bled a bit and there was pink, blood- spattered spit in the bathroom washbowl. I had developed mild gum disease. Carry on like this and not treat the problem and I could theoretically lose some teeth.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Better than nothing, but you gotta work the somewhat dry powder down into the gum line. . . and it takes at least five seconds to kill the bacteria. Just swishing with a dilute solution isn't going to do that.
All your friends would start to avoid you. . . and you'd make new friends among the lice and flea community.
No, it's a good question. We had a patient, a woman, who had been gargling with strong peroxide for years and her incisors were almost completely transparent. The doctor could not talk her out of her fetish mouthwash. She saw nothing wrong with it. She was complaining about how sensitive her teeth were.
My brother is a veterinarian and he told me a lot of dogs die of kidney failure that is caused by the bacteria that lives in their mouths and builds up on their teeth.
YOU, the Harpo Marx image master of FR, actually wrote something?!!!
:)
Worth a try Bump!!
Good post. Are mouthwashes with cetylpyridinium chloride any better?
Bookmark.
These are some of the most interesting creatures on Earth. . . and they do some very WEIRD behaviors. We've seen them all swimming in the same direction in a coordinated motion, in time, within the field of the microscope;s viewfinder. Once we saw what we thought was the Jolly Green Giant of Spirochetes. . . it extended from one side of the field of view to the other and acted in a coordinated manner. Then after about ten minutes, it suddenly disconnected and became SIX discrete spirochetes that all went their separate ways. Other times we see them suddenly decide to form a big puff ball of spirochetes, with one end into the center, and tails (?) out, sometimes comprising dozens to up to a hundred spirochetes. If they are threatened, the curl into a ball for the duration and can dry out until conditions are better, sometimes for years. They can survive even attacks of antibiotics this way.
Nope. . . no chorine in the bunch. It's the chorine that kills the bugs. The government doesn't allow mouthwash to be strong enough to do the job.
The spirochetes we are after thumb their noses (metaphorically speaking) at almost everything. They are the 1% that are left behind in those TV ads that Listerine and Scope claims kills 99% of bacteria. The Clorox solution is also to only known substance that will dissolve the plaques they hid under.
Okay, interesting.
I’m not sure what to make of this. On the one hand, those videos of the spirochetes in plaque are pretty disgusting and it’s alarming just how many of them there are. On the other hand, in an environment like the mouth it would be pretty amazing if it weren’t bacteria central. I wonder if trying to kill them off wouldn’t be a little like trying to kill off your intestinal flora. Is it possible a better approach would be to encourage a healthy mouth flora rather than try to wipe it out? In the people who don’t have the spirochetes, do they have no bacteria at all or is it that their mouths are populated with other kinds of bacteria (besides spirochetes)?
My hygienist told me the same. I buy the cheaper unseen tend brands and they’ve worked fine for years now.
Unscented.
My grandfather died at the ripe old age of 52 from a heart attack that was related to his poor dental hygiene.
Funny thing: none of the other primates brush their teeth or suffer gray matter shrinkage, or neuro-degenerative diseases, or Alzheimer’s. I smell a simple commordity.
Wow! Thanks for this tip.
I have been using baking soda for years, but have never tried Dakin’s Solution (it makes sense though).
What do you think of electric toothbrushes, like Sonicare or Oral-B? How about Water Piks?
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