When Flossing is Not Enough

Dental disease, like any other disease, is caused by bacteria.

It can be spread from tooth to tooth, from person to person (e.g., mother-to-child or wife-to-husband), and it can grow on your toothbrush.

But, not all bacteria is bad. Some bacteria is beneficial and others harmful.  There is always bacteria present in your mouth. But is it good protective bacteria or bad destructive bacteria?

I have patients that are dedicated to brushing and flossing and get their teeth cleaned routinely and faithfully, yet they still have periodontal disease or tooth decay on a regular basis. Other patients don’t come in for a decade or more, have plaque coating their teeth and have no decay whatsoever. The first group is doing everything right and still having problems, and the second is doing everything wrong without problems, so what is the deal?

It is not luck.

It is not genetics.

It is mouth chemistry!

Envision a fish bowl with stones in the bottom. If the water in the fish bowl is green with algae, murky and gross, you can clean the stones two or three times a day and as soon as you placed them back in the bowl the stones would be dirty and slimy again. In this case the stones are the teeth and the water is your saliva. If the saliva is out of balance, of poor consistency or inadequate, it allows the bad destructive bacteria to flourish and—viola—you can develop tooth decay and periodontal disease. On the other hand if the saliva is properly balanced, the bad bacteria cannot thrive, and dental decay becomes highly improbable.

The health, consistency and amount of saliva is a major factor in creating or maintaining the health of your mouth. One key factor is the pH of the saliva. If it is too acidic, this a breeding ground for the bad bacteria. They thrive and create even more acid to attack the teeth.

Most people don’t realize that this acid-loving destructive bacteria attacks and weakens all of the surfaces of all of the teeth at the same time. This disease which we dentists call dental caries is not restricted to just one tooth or to some random surface of just one tooth. It is the weakest or the most stressed part of the tooth that develops the decay. As you can see, fixing that one tooth cavity will not change the environment or eradicate the disease of dental caries which is still attacking and weakening the enamel throughout the mouth.

Unfortunately, this is how we dentists were trained. If a patient has a cavity, fix the tooth. The tooth decay or cavity is an end result of the disease dental caries, but for decades we dentists have ignored the underlying causative factors that have caused the decay.

The hue and cry of the dentists has been floss more, brush better, and slather it all in fluoride, but isn’t this is just polishing the stones in a dirty fish bowl.

And what about fluoride? It can make the enamel stronger, but it just happens to be more ineffective in an acidic mouth. So, if your mouth is not acidic, do you need it? And if it is acidic, is it effective?

Why don’t we just treat the underlying cause, the disease of dental caries, by making the oral environment healthy.

How pure is the water in your fish bowl?

For more information check out my video: Your Saliva May Be Killing You.