Tagged: dental floss
“Flossing Has No Effects”
Update below.
No wonder when our professional societies and academies want to promote it with the above images. The Facebook page of the German Society of Periodontology features the left image while the right supports a recent statement by the American Academy of Periodontology’s President, Dr. Wayne Aldredge, regarding the U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services recent decision to remove flossing from the federal 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines, citing the gap in quality research.
When Should Evidence – Or Rather Lack Thereof – be Ignored?
When the European Federation of Periodontology (EFP) was about to publish their 2014 workshop proceedings, eyebrows were raised in particular after reports of a press conference emerged. I remember that “Flossing may be a waste of time” (as there was no evidence for the prevention of interdental gingivitis found after thorough literature search), but can’t find the respective newspaper article anymore. As Professor Iain Chapple outlined, if there is space in between teeth, interdental brushes would do better as an adjunct to toothbrushing.
Motivation and Instruction in Oral Hygiene
Whether monkeys liked it when dental floss was used by scientist Jack Caton in Rochester, NY, in his studies in 1979 (see the abstract here) we do not know. But we do know that they like to do it by themselves, at least since the 2009 paper by Masatake et al. (PLoS ONE 4(3): e4768. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0004768).
I have long used, in my classes, this amazing movie of some monkeys in Thailand below, which not only use tourists’ hairs for interdental tooth cleaning but even teach their attentive offspring how to do flossing. Although the technique is not exactly what we teach our students.
It is a bit controversially discussed here whether the video might be used for motivation and instruction in oral hygiene measures in our dental clinic in the case of patients who express problems with proper flossing.
14 November 2012 @ 1:19 pm.
Last modified November 14, 2012.
Periodontology 