How to Brush Teeth With Braces

Video Transcript

"So do you have braces and you're just dying to know how to brush your teeth with them? My name's Michelle and I'm a dental assistant with Solutions and I'm going to, basically, kind of show you the great way of brushing your teeth with braces. It's pretty simple, first what you need to do is you just get your toothbrush and some toothpaste. The best way to brush your teeth with braces is, of course, you really can't brush them normally as if you would if you did not have braces so what you really need to do is you angle your toothbrush down towards the bracket, which is the little silver thing here, and then you kind of just go back and forth and then you do the same thing to the bottom part of the bracket. You want to angle your toothbrush up towards it and go back and forth. What this is going to do is it's going to free the debris and get all the bacteria that, sometimes what happens is the bacteria and the debris accumulates right around the bracket so you just, by angeling it, down towards the bracket and then angeling it up underneath the bracket, that's going to free the debris off of your teeth. On how to clean in between your teeth, a lot of times after you eat, you get a lot of food products that are left over. What you need to get is what we call a proxy brush. A lot of times when you go to your orthodontist, they have already an orthodontic kit that they'll give to you, once you get your braces on. The proxy brush looks just like this, it almost like a little tiny Christmas tree. You're going to take the proxy brush, you stick it up in between the teeth, underneath the wire and then you kind of just brush it back and forth, that's going to free any of the food products that might be left over from in between your teeth. You want to do this between all of your teeth and then you want to, at least, when you have braces on you want to brush and floss your teeth, at least, twice a day, if you can do three times a day that's great or even every time after you eat something, then you want to try to brush and floss your teeth. Once again my name's Michelle and I just showed you on how you can brush your teeth when you have braces on."