Dentistry's Dirty Little Secret

When you clean a surface of the tooth the bacteria begin to grow (colonize) .   They cannot feed on their own they only feed as colonies .   Our only defense is to mechanically break up the colonies .  We cannot eliminate bacteria and we would not want to if we could.  Our only defense is disrupting the feeding organization (colonization)   The mechanism for disrupting the colonies require only one thing ...you must come in contact  with them and physically dislodge them.  Our armenentarium in this battle include the only weapons at hand:   1) bristles of a brush under the gums  2)  dental floss and our long neglected allie  :  sharpened wooden stick the lowly toothpick.

You must understand bristles of a brush and dental floss can only clean convexities and on front and back surface of every root guess what is right below where enamel stops  ?   the roots are concave.  You cannot clean that area with a piece of string.   It requires the proper adaptation of a toothpick and that adaptation is close to parallel to the long axis (the up down dimension) of the tooth.  As simple as this may sound it is not routinely taught.   It is dentistry's dirty little secret.

This may read as a complex message ..  it is not.  The message is  bacterial colonies must be disrupted and the weapons that you bring to the fight are brush,  string or floss, and sharpened wooded stick.