Dental Hygiene: how is it any better than brushing your teeth?

It is easy to think that brushing your teeth regularly would be sufficient to keep them healthy. Unfortunately for all of us, however, this is not quite as true as we may hope. As it turns out our teeth are exposed to too many attacks daily, and brushing twice a day is only one of the many things we need to do.

What affects the health of our teeth?

Aside from food and drink particles which attach to our teeth when we eat or drink, the acidity from food also affects the microbiology in our mouths, turning our own saliva into an enemy of our teeth. Thankfully, this is rather easy to prevent – all you need to do is drink plenty of water and make sure that you limit soft drinks and other food intake only to meal times. If you can add a mouth rinse after every meal or snack, you’ll even further increase your chances of keeping your teeth healthy.

What about the sneaky food particles under the gum line?

One of the biggest problems we face in modern world is that plenty of the food that we consume is starchy. As tasty as it is, starchy food contains millions of miniature particles. During the chewing process, these miniature particles find their way around our teeth and usually settle close to the gum line, attaching to the tooth.

When we later brush our teeth, the larger majority of the particles will be reached by the bristles of your tooth brush and removed. A few of them, however, will be pushed under the gum line and attach to the root of the tooth. However vigorous your brushing may be (and we actually recommend that you are kind to the soft tissue in your mouth), the toothbrush cannot reach more than 2mm under the gum line and even when it does, the motion is often pushing the particles even further down. Over time, these particles will start eating in the root of your teeth, creating infections which is most cases lead to the need for a root canal treatment.

What is even more distressing about this process is that over time, the food particles will form a hard layer around the root of the tooth, attracting and easily capturing more and more particles. The infection which develops under the gum line then starts affecting the soft tissues, and the gums begin to recess – a process which cannot be overturned.

How does regular dental hygiene help?

With all the unpleasant information above, we’re sure you need some good news and we’ve got them – the process described above takes a while and there’s no need to panic. All you need to consider is having a really good clean that reaches under the gem line a few times a year and voila – all is sorted.

As with everything in life – you don’t want to overdo it with oral hygiene. Your organism needs to remain in charge of keeping you healthy, so having a hygiene performed too often may make it lazy and more prone to quickly develop infections. This is why you want to make sure you visit your hygienist approximately every six months, or if you already have signs of gum recessions – every 3 to 4 months.

But wait, why is dental hygiene better than brushing?

Dental hygiene is performed using specialised dental instruments which were designed to reach well below the gum line without irritating or damaging the soft tissue inside your mouth. When all external particles are removed from below the gum line, it heals rapidly and closes tightly around the gum, preventing new particles from entering.