Tooth-Brushing Techniques for Oral Hygiene

Video Transcript

"Hi I’m Dr. Scott Chandler with Silver Creek Dental on behalf of Expert Village.com. This clip is about how to properly brush your teeth using a manual toothbrush, the kind that most of us has just in our medicine cupboard at home. What we have here is a standard toothbrush. They’ve all gotten pretty fancy with handles and things to hold onto that actually help do a better job brushing your teeth. So get one of these with the fancy gizmos, go ahead and get one. Here on this model we’ve got somebody that has all their teeth pretty good looking and healthy. What you do is start brushing your teeth, put a little dab of toothpaste on there and you go ahead and start brushing. It is important that you always don’t start in the same section of your mouth. What happens is you get the abrasiveness of the toothpaste and that initial big blob and if you always start in the same spot, you can do some damage to your teeth and gums in that area. So just move it around a little bit and start in a different area every so often. So you’ve got a little toothpaste on there and first of all I like to go ahead and start on the upper molars for example. You brush the biting surfaces right up there where everything sticks; where all your candy sticks in the cracks. So you brush those really good in those cracks and you move all the way around the mouth and make sure you are getting all of those. Then you want to switch around and get to the outside. Now when you get to the outside you want to turn your toothbrush to a little bit of a 45 degree angle so that it angles right up in there and those bristles actually sink down underneath the gums a little bit. That is going to help get that plaque and bacteria that is down in those little pockets in your gums. Don’t do it real heavy back and forth motion. That tends to ware your teeth and hurt your gums so that it angles right up in there and those bristles actually sink down underneath the gums just a little bit. That is going to help get that plaque and bacteria that is down in those little pockets in your gum. Don’t do a real heavy back and forth motion. That tends to ware your teeth and hurts your gum. Just a gentle massage on those gums. So if you think of it as doing two separate things. One, you brush your teeth and then you make sure you are brushing your gums. If you do that in two steps, then you tend to do a pretty good job. One spot that a lot of people miss and we tend to see a lot of build up on teeth coming in for a professional cleaning, is right behind these lower front teeth. Right below these lower front teeth is kind of hard to get in there. So if you’ve got one of these toothbrushes that are a little taller on the front, they do that for a reason and that’s so you can tip that toothbrush and get right down inside. So just go ahead and tip that thing and get it right back behind those front teeth. Brush them good. Little circles. I’ve even seen some people that will do the nibbler technique where they stick that in there and kind of bite on it a little bit and that shoves those bristles down in there and knocks all that stuff loose. So be sure you are doing a really good job getting all that area as well. Around the sides of those upper molars. Those are kind of hard to get to. There is a cheek bone that gets in your way out there. So what you want to do is go ahead and scoot your jaw to the side like that and if you scoot your jaw to the side like that, it opens up space that you can now get in there without being hindered by that jaw bone. "