How to Floss Properly 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 floss your teeth. Flossing is that thing that nobody likes to do or nobody likes to talk about. Flossing is a really important way to avoid cavities between your teeth as well as gum disease which can cause tooth loss prematurely and they have now linked that gum disease to a heart disease, stroke, kidney disease and a whole bunch of really terrible things. So let’s make sure we are getting a good flossing done. What I like to use is some of these newer flosses like Glide or Oral B satin floss, kind of Teflon like floss that is for those of you like me. I have really hard teeth to get in between. I use that for an excuse not to floss. Well, not any more. This Teflon tape is a little easier to slide this stuff between the teeth. Now what you want to do with a piece of floss is first of all you get you a pretty good size piece and you take it and wrap it around your fingers like that so that you have a good grip. You use other fingers to get around that thing. Now I will show you a little bit here on me and then I’ll show the model. What you want to do is take that floss and get it right up there in between the teeth and you see how I’m using my fingers and thumbs. Okay, now you can see better here. We’ll take that floss and you want to slide it right up in between the teeth and then you wrap it around the tooth to the side and you slide that up and down, up and down. Don’t do a saw back and forth. You just want to go up and down, tuck that underneath those gums. If you can see that there where that floss disappears underneath the gums. That is what you want to have happen. Now if you’re not a regular flosser for the first week or two that you floss every day, your gums are going to bleed and that’s okay. It just means that they are not healthy and flossing is going to get them healthy. So go ahead and keep flossing and they will stop bleeding. Don’t panic. What you do then is you come out above those gums so you are not tucked under the gums, then you scoot over to the tooth beside it and same thing, you go up and down, up and down. Make sure that you are getting all that plaque off between those teeth. Now you use that same concept all the way around the mouth being sure to get really well between the molars. "