By: Revanche

This is a Dental BSA (Blog Service Announcement)

June 12, 2008

Do yourself a favor and save yourself a really uncomfortable visit to the dentist. I don’t mean skip it entirely! Even though I didn’t have a copay, I was levied a toll of the worst dental pain ever on Monday. As a rule, I like the dentist. Admittedly, this is because I’ve been fairly lucky and have had very few cavities. Also, the dentist pales in comparison to the torture of the orthodontist under whose heel I suffered for years.

So, coming from someone who doesn’t fear the dentist and enjoys dental visits: please, please floss right or you will quickly learn why people rate fear of the dentist second only to public speaking.

Turns out that there is a wrong way to floss: my way.

I’ve been using a Reach flosser because I always complain that my hands are too big to fit inside my mouth. It’s been so long that I’ve given away all my free regular floss from all those Walgreens FAR deals. I might have an old dusty box hiding in a supplies box somewhere, and I’ll have to break it out now.

This is how you floss correctly:

1. Take a long string of floss, wrap it around your fingers.
2. Wrap a section of the floss around your tooth in a C shaped, and scrape it so that you’re hitting the front and back of your tooth. (Ugh, I don’t like the thought of scraping. But it’s better to floss that way than have the dentist doing it later!) Do the same for the other side.
3. Use a new section for every tooth. This prevents you from just moving bacteria from one tooth to the next one.

It’s pretty simple, but I sure wish my dental school friend had told me this earlier!