Video: Using Floss Threaders for Oral Hygiene

Learn how to use floss threaders and get expert tips and advice on keeping healthy teeth and oral hygiene in this free instructional video.

Video Transcript

Hi I’m Dr. Scott Chandler with Silver Creek Dental. This clip is about using a special little tool to help clean your teeth called the floss threader. Now some people have difficult to get between places in their teeth where teeth have been bonded together for example or you may have a dental bridge and a bridge here is where you have three or more teeth that are connected together. You’ve got the teeth under there but they are missing one in the middle. So there all bonded together and they are glued on there and that’s a permanent restoration. You can’t take it off to clean under that space between those two teeth. It is very important to clean under there and I am going to show you how. The first thing I like to show you here is called the floss threader. It is a little piece of stiff nylon kind of like fishing line almost and what you do with that is you take your floss, just stick it through there, leaving some hanging out on both sides. Now with that floss threader, you thread right behind the post on that bridge. You poke that through so that it is coming through the other side and you pull that through, hold one side of your floss and then pull the other side through. So walla! There’s your floss all the way through underneath that spot that you couldn’t get under before. Now you take your floss and you just move it back and forth all the way underneath that area there. Show you here and that goes underneath the gums. My model is a little tight but we will show you here. Go all the way underneath the gums and up the other side and when you are done, you just pull the floss out. That is how you use a floss threader to clean under a bridge. Now there is one other variation on this theme here and it’s called super floss. You can buy these pretty much at any drug store around so just go take a look. Super floss has a section here of thick ropey tight floss. You pull it and it gets tight and gets skinnier and you let it go and it is kind of like a sponge almost. At the end of that is a piece of that stiff nylon so you use that stiff nylon there, poke it underneath that bridge again, same as before, pull it through and then you use that good thick part of that floss to clean down underneath that bridge and of course, getting along those teeth that are used to support that bridge. If you lose one of those teeth, you lose the whole kit and kaboodle so you want to make sure that you floss that area really good. The good thing about the super floss is that they rest piece of floss is pretty regular floss that you can use for flossing everywhere else in your mouth so go ahead and use that and get everywhere else in between those teeth.

Using Floss Threaders for Oral Hygiene

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