Basic Dental Hygiene Kit should include Electric Tooth Brush (you can check “electric Vs Manual tooth brush in our blog) and Dental Floss. Nothing else if you don’t have Implants, braces or other specific work done in your mouth.
But the question is why so many people rinse and pays every month for something with no scientific evidence compared to people who do not use this method of oral hygiene.
First of all is important to know that the oral hygiene in order to be effective needs to be performed within enough time to do it right, just like when we are having a shower. A shower that takes 2 minutes will not clean our whole body, we must wash ourselves effectively and that takes a minimum time.
We have time to spend in front of our mobile phone looking at Instagram and Facebook and spend hours and hours reviewing peoples lives with no benefit for us, but when it comes to take care of something so valuable such as our teeth, we don’t have even 2 minutes to brush properly.
In order to solve that, and paying attention to the commercials about rinsing which informs that by rinsing we are going to “feel fresh” and will eliminate the “99% of the bacterias” in our mouth we feel completed.
Well, here there are many misunderstandings. The first one, by eliminating the 99% of bacterias most of them live inside our mouth and protect us from other bacterias and germs, so that would represent a risk of opportunist fungus, and other bacterias that will create a huge damage to our tissues.
By using such an aggressive rinse in a daily basis, the regular pH and normal flora of our mouth would drop and would allow new reinfections as well.
By listening to the “magic product” that in matter of seconds saves time and “money”, the society ends up listening to what they want to hear without understanding that by using the wrong product they will not help themselves.
Rinsing products can never compare their efficiency when oral hygiene is needed compared to tooth brushing and flossing.
Another example would be applied to car wash… Do we have in the market any “magic product” that we spread over our car that makes our car look completely clean without using any sponge or physical brushing of the surface? The answer is NO.
Even some commercials instead of recommending visiting the dentist when some canker sores or other signs /symptoms appear, they offer the “magic product” that might mask an important disease.
The rinse should be under prescription by the Periodontists and Oral Surgeons for a specific purpose, for example, after a surgery to avoid infections of the wound, during a periodontal therapy, but always for a specific and limited time.
There is no need to use a daily basis rinse when we are performing the correct tooth brush and flossing.
The best rinsing wash is the one that we create with the tooth paste and the water to rinse when we finish brushing.
Dr. Nicolas Aronna Mallia
Periodontics & Implant Dentistry,
New York University
