41–50 of 390 posts
Isn't flossing not supported by science also, but all the news articles said you should keep flossing?
Flossing daily isn't necessary if you're an adequate manual brusher. Relatively few people are adequate manual brushers.
Buy a good electric toothbrush, floss periodically.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, flossing cannot be proven to help. But it cannot be proven to hurt, either, so current recommendations are to do it anyway.
>cannot be proven to hurt Inserting floss between your teeth pushes them slightly apart. I wonder if that could have any negatives?
> "Financial aspects of dental radiography also deserve further study," Feit added No joke. That is a major money maker. There is minimal cost per-use and your insurance pays $200 for it (my last one was $186.00 for instance). The dentists would be crazy not to recommend them as of often as possible. Fluoride "rinses" are likely up there too. Rinse for a few seconds and they charge the insurance $50 or something for…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I asked mine, and he said the wisdom teeth can crowd teeth if the jaw size is too small causing buckling (a cosmetic issue). More seriously, it can interfere with nerves in your jaw (again because of size constraints) causing numbness / paralysis, etc. Likely the decision to remove them comes down to your genetic / jaw structure and whether they have fully come in yet or not. https://www.webmd.com/oral-health/wisdom-…
I had mine done in college. I really didn't want to do it. I would have been totally happy to buck the pressure of "this is what everyone does," but the thing that made me reluctantly agree to it was an explanation that if I didn't, they would bore holes into my then-back teeth as they grew in and I'd have a big problem to deal with. As I understood it, teeth normally grow straight up, but wisdom teeth grow sideways…
Other outdated yet still routine dental practices include polishing of teeth during checkups for any justification other than cosmetic reasons
My bugbear with dentists in the US (after living my first 30 years in the UK) is that they all continually hassle me to have my wisdom teeth removed. Said teeth have never caused me any problems and are all through the gums. I can only assume it's dogma or an opportunity to bill insurance for costly unnecessary surgery.
This may be specific to location, but would it be the same dentist recommending the treatment as performing the surgery? Here (BC, Canada) everyone I've known who's had wisdom teeth removed had it done by a specialist, not the dentist that suggested it (which presumably cuts down on self-serving recommendations).
Isn't flossing not supported by science also, but all the news articles said you should keep flossing?
Yes, flossing cannot be proven to help. But it cannot be proven to hurt, either, so current recommendations are to do it anyway.
Isn't flossing not supported by science also, but all the news articles said you should keep flossing?
Yes, flossing cannot be proven to help. But it cannot be proven to hurt, either, so current recommendations are to do it anyway.
That's not a meaningful standard for any health intervention. If I'd apply everything to my body that wasn't proven to hurt I'd spend a hundred bucks every morning and two hours in the bathroom. If "it doesn't hurt" was sufficient basis for a recommendation our doctors would tell us to swallow homeopathic medicine every morning.
It seems pretty obvious that anything you apply has to have at least some measurable impact, otherwise you're basically in the same category as the supplement industry.
I get an annual dental checkup (military) with the around-the-face x-ray machine. The first thing the dentist does is to compare it to last year's scan. The x-ray allows them to spot all sorts of things they would otherwise miss, especially since I don't think I've ever seen exactly the same dentist twice. Teeth move. Teeth wear down or chip. Sometimes this can be spotted by eye but the x-ray record is more reliable and more easily communicated between offices.
As for radiation, if you are worried about an annual dental x-ray then you better not fly in an airplane, live in Colorado, or hang around too long near the bananas at the grocery store.