One part of our body that is easy to overlook are our teeth.  Not just our teeth but our oral cavity or mouth as a whole.  Maintaining good oral health helps us live a comfortable life being able to eat what we want, and being able to socialize with other people without worrying about turning people away.  Dentists and dental hygienists help us maintain a good oral health.  They provide a good cleaning of our teeth, repair teeth that have been damaged and even replace the teeth that we have lost.  However, maintenance still depends on us.

Regular tooth brushing is the most basic step that you can do to maintain good oral health.  A lot of companies provide different tooth brushes that have different features addressing various problems that we encounter in brushing our teeth.  Some offer flexible heads, different lengths of tooth brush bristles, and some even have rubber attached to the tooth brush head that serves to massage the gums while you brush.  But do these kinds of brush really do the job of giving a good clean?  If you ask most dentists or if you read the journals you find in your dentists’ clinic, you will find out that the level of cleaning that we do ourselves depend mostly on the technique on how we brush our teeth and not on the kind of tooth brush that we use.

Aside from brushing our teeth, one oral hygiene that we need to develop is flossing.  Most people don’t really think about doing flossing since they already brush their teeth.  What you don’t realize is that the tooth brush only cleans the places that it can reach.  The areas in between the teeth where they are in contact with the teeth beside them are tight and the tooth brush bristles are not able to get in between them.  That is what the dental floss is for.  You use it to clean the areas in between teeth that are in contact with other teeth.  This helps prevent the formation of plaque in between the teeth and it also helps prevent the formation of caries.  You only need to a lot a few minutes of your time to floss.  Those few minutes could help you save your teeth from caries that could later on lead to tooth aches.  Unlike tooth brushing, you only need to perform flossing once a day.  Preferably at night after you brush your teeth or after before you go to bed.  It removes lodged food particles in between teeth, and unlike toothpicks, they are relatively safer to use.

Aside from the steps mentioned, there are other additional or adjunctive measures we can use to make sure we keep our teeth and gums healthy.  Oral rinses provide a quick way of making our breath smell pleasant.  But what most people think is that oral rinses are enough to prevent the progression of gum disease, plaque and caries.  This is incorrect use of an oral rinse.  Although some oral rinses have antibacterial effect, the food particles and plaque still need to be removed physically from the mouth.  And the antibacterial components of these oral rinses can affect chemistry of our oral cavity

Whatever we put inside our mouth will have effects on our oral health.  This includes food and other vices that we may have such as, alcohol and cigarettes and even the medicine that we take.  Sugary food causes caries over time.  Alcohol and cigarettes can lead to oral diseases like periodontitis and even oral cancers.  All in all, dentists help us maintain our oral health.  But it is still up to us to make sure we have good oral health through our practices and habits.