Flossing Without Flossing?

Flossing Without Flossing?

You almost certainly brush your teeth. You might use mouthwash. A lot of people floss for three weeks at a time, often in January.

There are a lot of options for oral hygiene; variations of the above, and many alternatives too. This is a big topic, so rather than try to squeeze it all in one, this will be a several-part series.

The first part was: Toothpastes & Mouthwashes: Which Help And Which Harm?

How important is flossing?

Interdental cleaning is indeed pretty important, even though it may not have the heart health benefits that have been widely advertised:

Periodontal Disease and Atherosclerotic Vascular Disease: Does the Evidence Support an Independent Association?

However! The health of our gums is very important in and of itself, especially as we get older:

Flossing Is Associated with Improved Oral Health in Older Adults

But! It helps to avoid periodontal (e.g. gum) disease, not dental caries:

Flossing for the management of periodontal diseases and dental caries in adults

And! Most certainly it can help avoid a stack of other diseases:

Interdental Cleaning Is Associated with Decreased Oral Disease Prevalence

…so in short, if you’d like to have happy healthy teeth and gums, flossing is an important adjunct, and/but not a one-stop panacea.

Is it better to floss before or after brushing?

As you prefer. A team of scientists led by Dr. Claudia Silva studied this, and found that there was “no statistical difference between brush-floss and floss-brush”:

Does flossing before or after brushing influence the reduction in the plaque index? A systematic review and meta-analysis

Flossing is tedious. How do we floss without flossing?

This is (mostly) about water-flossing! Which does for old-style floss what sonic toothbrushes to for old-style manual toothbrushes.

If you’re unfamiliar, it means using a device that basically power-washes your teeth, but with a very narrow high-pressure jet of water.

Do they work? Yes:

Effects of interdental cleaning devices in preventing dental caries and periodontal diseases: a scoping review

As for how it stacks up against traditional flossing, Liang et al. found:

❝In our previous single-outcome analysis, we concluded that interdental brushes and water jet devices rank highest for reducing gingival inflammation while toothpick and flossing rank last.

In this multioutcome Bayesian network meta-analysis with equal weight on gingival inflammation and bleeding-on-probing, the surface under the cumulative ranking curve was 0.87 for water jet devices and 0.85 for interdental brushes.

Water jet devices and interdental brushes remained the two best devices across different sets of weightings for the gingival inflammation and bleeding-on-probing. ❞

~ Journal of Evidence-Based Dental Practice

You may be wondering how safe it is if you have had dental work done, and, it appears to be quite safe, for example:

BDJ | Water-jet flossing: effect on composites

Want to try water-flossing?

Here are some examples on Amazon:

• Waterpik Complete Care 9.0 ← example of a top-end water-flossing device
• Philips Sonicare Power Flosser 3000 ← top-tier not-Waterpik-brand device
• INSMART Cordless Water Dental Flosser ← very low price and still average 4.5 star reviews, so in our opinion, a fine first choice

Bonus: if you haven’t tried interdental brushes, here’s an example for that 😎

Enjoy!