Many years ago I used a strange neutral tasting oily mouthwash that was clear oil in green fluid. The marketing said it used some magnetic or like that too get rid of physical debris. When finishing the wash and spitting it out, there was a cloud of chunky stuff in the mixture. This was a while ago, when I was a small child, so I didn’t really think to test it very much, such as for example putting it in a clean water bottle, spitting in the bottle few times and then shaking it for a while and dumping the contents and seeing if there’s any chunks.
So I am asking whether this debris removing mouthwash is legit and actually removing any debris or if it’s just making its own debris kind of like rotten milk too like it’s working.
Also, to this day I’ve never ever seen this stuff for sale anywhere ever, as it stopped being sold at the shops that I was shopping at. What do you think of this?
It wasn’t the mouthwash that cured the plague. Either you were misdiagnosed, or you were also taking antibiotics, and those actually cured the plague. A lot of people make this error of attribution, and it’s how a lot of “faith-healing” belief gets started. Someone will be getting standard chemotherapy, then also go to Lourdes, and their cancer will go into remission, and they’ll tell everyone Lourdes wrought a miracle for them.
The Plague sounds scary because it once was, but that was in the middle ages. Bacteria were responsible for plagues (The Black Death was probably Yersinia pestis); since the middle ages, bacteria have fallen to antibiotics like Goliath to David.
So, it originally came in two different colors, green and purple. For some very odd reason, the purple color seemed to produce more visible debris than the green color. They both treated quite pleasant and oily in the mouth and had absolutely zero burning, no matter long long you sloshed around for. I don’t know if it actually did anything productive, but it
was extremely pleasant in the mouth.
For which the TV ads definitely did imply that the chunks you see in the sink after spitting out, are debris that it removed from your teeth. The claim in the linked page above is that these blobs are bacteria that are captured by a polar molecule in the mouthwash.
I bought a bottle and tested it a long time ago - my impression from that test was that the solid-looking chunks in the sink are just snotty blobs of mouthwash - I think there’s some sort of curdling reaction when it mixes with your saliva.
If the blobs were actually evidence of something being removed, they should reduce in number after repeated immediate uses - in my test, they did not - I used half a bottle - maybe 9 or 10 rinses - and the number of ‘bacteria blobs’ in the last spit was indistinguishable from the first.
When I talked to my dental hygienist * about flossing in Addition to brushing, I asked if those Little electric thingies you can buy that squirt a thin stream of water wouldn’t be just as good as flossing with a string. Her reply was that what she’d learned during apprenticeship was that Plaque quickly hardens into a layer that can’t be removed with water, because Plaque means the “water-insoluble remains”, hence flossing and brushing
Currently, dentists are no longer recommending flossing with string, but with Little Christmas-tree-shaped thingies like this Datei:TePe Interdental Brushes original.jpg – Wikipedia
The reasoning is that the space between two teeth is not a straight line, but (exaggerated) more like a bottle shape, so a brush picks up and removes more bacteria than a string.
Most dentists and dental hygienists advise against mouthwash, because it’s mostly high alcohol, which kills all bacteria (good and bad), leading to dry mouth, leading to more Problems with the bad bacteria. If the Problem is bad breath, toothbrushing and tongue scraping is better (or maybe a doctor visit, if the smell Comes from elsewhere). If you want to help your teeth, toothbrushing plus interdental brushes are best. Mouthwash can not replace brushing, but a good brushing makes mouthwash unnecessary.
If you’ve eaten something sweet, sticky, or acidic, rinse your mouth with clear water and wait half an hour before brushing, and chew some sugarfree gum to increase your spit production (your spit contains a bit of good bacteria). That’s what most dentists recommend (not the actors in White coats in Commercials, but when the health insurances give out tips on improving your health for example).
which I pay for a yearly visit where she removes the Plaque from my teeth
I mentioned that I used a water flosser last time I went to the dentist, and they said that was fine.
I don’t think that the purpose of flossing is to remove plaque, necessarily, just to remove food particles from the pockets between your teeth, and to toughen up your gums, both of which the water pick can do just fine.
I think the idea is to prevent plaque buildup in the first place by brushing regularly, and then to remove any that might have built up at your six month cleaning.
My dental hygienist has been recommending those Proxabrush things for a while now, and I’m trying to get used to them. I have problems getting to the back teeth with dental floss and these things are somewhat easier to get in there.
As for the oily mouthwash mentioned by the OP, it sounds like bullshit to me. I mean, the hygienist has to scrape with a metal implement to remove the plaque from my teeth, so why would any kind of a rinse get rid of it?
Plaque is a biofilm and therefore hard to remove. What the hygienist is removing is calculus, which forms after the plaque hardens, and I agree it’s unlikely that a mouthwash would remove it. However, according to the American Dental Association, there are “therapeutic mouthwashes” that help remove plaque (presumably before it hardens into calculus), if they contain chlorhexidine and/or essential oils. However chlorhexidine mouthwash is available only by prescription.
When I first read the description I thought maybe you were talking about Oil Pulling. I always thought it was nonsense but WebMD or the person who wrote this article seem to think it’s legit.
“This oral therapy is a type of Ayurvedic medicine [a traditional Indian system] that dates back 3,000 years,” says Jessica T. Emery, DMD, … “It involves swishing approximately 1 tablespoon of oil – typically coconut, sesame, or sunflower oil – in your mouth for about 20 minutes and then spitting it out.” It’s supposed to kill germs.
(Calculus is a.k.a. Tartar)
I use a proxabrush that has a handle like a toothbrush and I can replace the little brushes. I’m happy with it.
