The right way to brush your teeth! Dental myths with Dr Gill

[Music] hello and welcome back to the channel we we've we've got stuff um so I think this one's going to be very interesting um so from my perspective um on the last uh video we sort of talked about problems with gum disease and how you can try and prevent it but it's one thing to say brush better or use this brush or use that brush but actually Allison's brought along quite a lot of stuff so tell me what we've got here more importantly why have we got it I mean electric tooth brushes and you know why why not just a simple you know brush on a stick yes so we've got a big range of stuff so we've got some toothbrushes some little incidental brushes some toothpaste and some different types of floss so kind of go through each thing and go through kind of the pros and cons of them um when they might be indicated but what is this this this does not look like a pair of chattering teeth this looks quite major no so this is one of our Dental models that we we used to practice on but we can also use them to demonstrate things to patients so quite often in practice we'll use it to demonstrate how to brush your teeth properly which we'll be coming to later in the video okay so you say how to brush your teeth properly you know we've got big fancy electric one versus you know straightforward brush you know does it matter um so the the main thing behind it is technique um there is evidence to say that an electric toothbrush is better than a manual toothbrush and most of that comes down to technique so you could argue that the electric toothbrush is actually facilitating the better technique rather than it being a better thing yeah because because of the way the head moves because it's always brushing backwards and forwards compared to the manual where you have to physically do the movement it's a lot easier to get a better result with an electric one fair enough so what about the the the smaller square one we've got there yeah so this one is one for children okay so for babies to twoy olds is the age range for this one so for four babies it's really important that you kind of expose them from an early age to toothbrushes and things like that um so you can get little sleeves that you put over your fingers with little bristles on um for when they don't have any teeth um just to get them used to the feeling of you poking around in the mouth um but then you can also just use a toothbrush as well and just gently brush the gums okay with with with my little one my wife has started to get him used to she will count his teeth which seems to be working quite well yeah so this one is is really good because of the shape of the head um because if you can see it's slightly different in shape to an adult toothbrush sort of that's what made me sort of think hold on that doesn't look it's quite boxy yeah so it means that instead of having to focus on going around every side of the tooth you can just put it on top of a tooth and then you've got every side at once because wrangling a child to brush the teeth is it's a bit of an effort so why aren't adult toothbrushes made like that then good question fair enough one for bit of research perhaps um so yeah so we were speaking about why well how fancy does your electric toothbrush really need to be um the answer is not that fancy mhm um you can get it from cheap so like 20 to very expensive to like £300 that's a lot for toothbrush yeah it is um what you'll find as you go up the price ranges is that you kind of get more the better technology and more sort of gimmicky things like Bluetooth music when you're brushing uh so I think the main thing that I found it links to is the toothbrushes that I've used that have Bluetooth you can connect to an app and then you can see the areas of your mouth where you've kind of brushed more and where you potentially need to go back to okay that sounds interesting yeah is there any feedback from the toothbrush saying sort of you know go this way or uh not from the toothbrush with some of them you'll find that if you press too hard uh it does light up red so then you can kind of ease off a little bit um so that can help you a bit in terms of tooth so you're not brushing away all of your tooth structure fine so I realized you said that um the cheapest of these is about 2020 but that's still a lot of money for some people can I you know buy a regular toothbrush and then spend more money on my toothpaste and sort of try to compensate that way um buying a better toothbrush would be the better way to do it because buying toothpaste as I said kind of in the very first video we did it's more about the fluoride that's in your toothpaste um so I bought along a couple couple of different ones um so from your Colgate Total which was about3 in tesos to your bog standard Tesco essential one which was about 60 70p um the main thing that you need to look for is the fluoride on the back um the rest of the ingredients just kind of added extras so in terms of that on here where have we got that it's um there so it's that 1,450 1,450 against 1,450 so being careful here is it possible you're just paying for a fancy packet um the higher end ones potentially they don't want to get in trouble with any of the the fancy toothpaste companies but if your if money's tight buying the super cheap toothpaste will do the same thing fundamentally as an expensive one the main thing is getting rid of that plaque that bacteria on your teeth getting the fluoride onto them to help your teeth remineralize and keeping your mouth nice and clean essentially okay um so yeah in terms of manual toothbrushes I can't remember if we said in the first video but you want to be going to the softer end of the spectrum now I've so personal one I I found when I have a sof bristle toothbrush maybe I'm I just have to work that much harder whereas when I've got a nice stiff wire wool in there you know everything's nice and clean yeah so it can feel like things are cleaner um but with the harder toothbrushes it's a bit like sweeping a floor so if you sweep a floor with a big bristly brush you get off all the big bits so you get off all the leaves you get up all the dirt but then sweeping up the rest of the kind of um sawdust that's on the floor it's quite hard ah but with a soft tooth brush it's like a soft brush on the floor so you can often sweep up a lot more of the Dust the dirt that's there as well as all the bigger items see this this is why she's here this often you guys are just an extra I'm the one who's doing the learning here this is fantastic yeah so it's exactly the same with with the softer toothbrushes and with the softer brushes as well you're less likely to get that wear of your teeth whereas with the harder ones it's a lot easier to press hard and then cause a lot of um non-carious tooth loss MH um so then you're more likely to get things like abrasion cavities which is just loss of tooth because of brushing yeah because you've brushed it away fair enough I will well to be fair I do use an electric toothbrush at home and I do ease off when it goes red so I'm I'm I'm not completely um in the dark about it but I did not understand the difference between the soft and the hard that's very useful okay we've got one more brush on the table here your inter Dental brush yes so yeah so these are we spoke about them a little bit in the first video and we popped up a picture but I thought we' bring them in and show you how to use them in person um so these come in various different shapes and sizes um you can get handles for them which I'll put on in a bit bit of time um you can get them in various shapes if you see your dentist or your hygienist they will kind of help you out with selecting the right size brush for your teeth essentially they go between your teeth and really clean the gums between your teeth because if you're just cleaning kind of the fronts the backs and the biting surfaces of your teeth you're missing out all of the area that sits between them so then that's kind of where you can also get carries developing where you can get kind of food stuck so it helps really clean everything out um and improve things there okay great so we've got um you know a nice selection on there but a big thing about um Medicine Science dentist who know is it's about the numbers rather than just somebody saying it so Blain Devil's Advocate you've got the training but we've got the thing put your brush where your mouth is show us you know the difference then so I think it would be best if you show us how you do it and then I can then I can kind of show you how it's done and what you critiqued okay fine so how are we going to set this up so um do you want to start with a manual I know you don't use a manual sure yeah we'll go with the basics of that you might have to bear with us because we we're kind of doing this on the fly so there might be some random changes when we realize the cameras just aren't quite going to cut what we need here uh but we we'll give it a go um so do you want to show me how you brush in these okay so right so we've had to have a brief uh Tech change um so we're going to have a go at well I'm going to have a go at cleaning teeth yes so yeah do you want to give it a go show me how you'd brush these teeth sure this this is very very bizarre um oh yeah I know it's difficult because it's not not in your own mouth okay so I'm just trying to think what I I just shove it in and wiggle it around so I know that I'm going to want that circular pattern round and then I'm going across the top and then similarly circular on at the back and perhaps trying to get in the side bits from more side to side is yeah looks like you don't really need me yeah so really good job um okay the things you want to focus on doing are mostly what you did so you got on the gums you got around every surface of the tooth so teeth have three surfaces so there's the cheek side which we call the Buckle the biting side which is the accusal and then the tongue side which is the lingual so you got all three surfaces of them making sure you're getting on the gums so brushing small circles or you can do small kind of backwards and forwards motions m not neglecting the front front teeth so making sure you're going kind of all the way around brushing tiny backwards and forwards motion you can do as well to add on to this is do a little flick at the end so you do your little backwards and forwards and then you do a flick and then a little backwards and forwards and then a flick and then when you get onto the accusal surfaces you ought to be doing a good just a good scrub to get everything out of the fishes and then when you get onto the backs of your teeth to the lingual surfaces again back at that 45° angle small backwards and forwards motions you can do the little flick as well if you want then for the backs of the front teeth it's hard to get your toothbrush in at this angle so you want to be going kind of straight up then just brushing up and down gently like that so yeah so that's how you use a manual brush um similar way to kind of with the electric one you don't want to be put too much pressure on so if you find your bristles are kind of spaying out loads uh or if kind of after a couple of weeks your bristles look like they've been flattened you're probably pressing a bit too hard okay so kind of gentle pressure 45° into the gum small backwards and forwards motions gosh when you say if You' pressing too much the bristles will Sprat out just reminded my granddad his toothbrush used to look like it had you know fallen from orbit and hit bristles first they were just completely spayed and flattened out yeah so if your if your toothbrush is looking like that it's probably time to change it it's not really going to be doing much for you that's fair that's fair um so if we go on to electric toothbrush which you might be a bit more familiar with sure that again other brands of electric toothbrush are available yes um so yeah so great so do you want to show kind of what you'd normally do with an electric brush to be fair I I do think that I'm probably lazy with the electric toothbrush I think it probably does more for oh for me not sure it's going to go with the microphone so I normally just sort of put it on and maybe watch YouTube and just sort of let it do the work going round up and down I do scrub around the front but this is what this is what I'm saying with the manual one I know that I'm doing the work whereas this almost makes me feel like I'm getting lazy with it and then kind of going round if I push too much I know it'll go red for me but the flick that you were saying there I've don't do any of anything like that at all yeah so it is a bit of a different technique with an electric brush because it does do most of the work for you so where with a manual you do have to do all the brushing backwards and forwards you don't actually want to do that with with an electric one so because of the way the bristles because they move backwards and forwards um you want to just hold it on each tooth so hold it going around the three surfaces so again kind of 45° towards the gum and then you want to just hold it on a tooth at a time so if I turn it on so that she's pushing too hard she should see she should see a dentist get the proper training it's a bit harder on a to on a mule just on the table but you want to work your way around tooth tooth by tooth with this you don't want to be doing the backwards and forwards motion because that doesn't actually work with the toothbrush itself um so this does all the work for you in terms of how it's moving so you want to actually just be holding it onto each tooth for a couple of seconds then moving on to the next one keeping it at that for keeping it at that 45° angle into the gums and then moving on to the next one and then again when you get to the front teeth you don't you don't actually have to brush it backwards and forwards you just have to kind of of leave it there let it do its thing and then you can go back onto the tops of the teeth still at that 45° angle still going forwards like that and then you can just hold it again over the tops of the accusal surfaces just let it go backwards and forwards do it do its thing that's the bit that really feels like cheating for me nah that's use toothbrush and then hold it again on the lingual surface 45° and gradually go around just thinking about the way of doing it this way that way is it more more typical for people to get you know the the Decay or carries on the outside compared to the inside because I would presume that the tongue is actually going to be doing an element of cleaning and of its own right um it it depends on on different things so the most common sight of Decay is in between the teeth which is why I'll be showing you how to use the little inter Dental brushes um and then it depends on a lot of things as to if you get Decay kind of on the inner or out on the lingle or the Buckle surfaces of the teeth have seen more people with Buckle carries than lingual ones that's not to say it can't happen on any surface okay um so on the note of incidental brushes here's another one we prepared earlier it's turning into blue Pizza um so now we go I'll be honest I don't use these at home I find them far too tight and so I'm interested to see if this is exactly what I get terrified of home that's literally stuck in there and then I'm worried I'm going to have to go to the dentist with this thing stuck in my face these teeth are much easier to clean than mine these are fake teeth aren't they these are fake teeth yeah oh yeah of course the F yeah so with with these pretty good job um so how they work is you want to find ones that are a bit tight to get through but you're not having to force them through because then they might get stuck so if they just kind of glide through and you can wiggle them about in the space between your teeth they're probably a bit too small so you want them to have a little bit of resistance so this for this model is actually kind of perfect cuz you want you want that little bit of resistance CU it means that the brushes are or the bristles are actually big enough to do something um but it's not too big that is going to get stuck and you're going to have to go to your dentist to us and to pull out of your teeth so the way that's best to use it is you can angle it cuz your gums are rounded and this is straight this is straight um so you can bend it to the shape of your gums so it's just it's just essentially a fancy pipe cleaner so you can bend it a little bit with your hands to match the shape of your gums mhm uh so you've got your brush that's been bent to to fit your gum shape so just gently kind of push it through the Gap there we go and then you just want to rub it gently against the gum making sure you're getting down onto the actual gum and not hovering up just in the Gap so gently brushing backwards and forwards pulling it out giving it a rinse and then putting it back in to the next Gap along gently brushing backwards and forwards and then just repeating round all of these gaps yeah I can see that it's not going through there we go so you can put it backwards and forwards between your teeth like that and it molds a little bit better to your gums because you want it to be brushing down onto the gums as well so we're getting the teeth and then the gums as well okay that makes sense exactly um so that's kind of inter Dental brushes in a nutshell you're you might need more than one size for one mouth um so you might have a really big gap somewhere and need a big size and then you might have really tight gaps elsewhere need a smaller size stupid thing but I hadn't even considered having more than one I just thought it was like you know shoes like I have this size toothbrush okay yeah that makes sense yeah so if your gaps are really tight then you can use floss which which is what I do because I don't get on with those so I I I use the the the floss sort of harps because I I was imagine the other one if someone was going to come and strangle me later on with it yes that's that's fair fair enough so um we've got our two types of floss that we prepared earlier so we've got again other types of floss are available yeah this just happened to be what was in tesos other supermarkets are available oh my god um so yeah so we've got the floss Hearts which you use and then we've got o standard string floss um so features that you want to be looking for in your floss there are things that you can look features so um waxed unwaxed is the main one okay unwax tends to be a bit harder to get through the gaps um because it's bit Les a bit more it's not got that smooth coating yeah it's got more friction that's the word I'm trying to think of so yeah you want to be looking for a waxed over an unwaxed one um the wa waxed ones are a lot easier to get through the gaps in your teeth because they've got less friction than the unwaxed ones um so it's just a little bit more user friendly it's interesting I thought you'd have wanted the friction in order to pick the things up but I suppose if you can't use it yeah so you want you want something that's usable and that works well for you and the the flavor is just flavor flavor yeah it's of choice it doesn't really have any impact in the same way that flavors of your toothpaste don't really have an impact either um and then you have the floss hops which which can be quite good if you don't like using the string floss so can you show me how you use them just going straight I push down and so there we go I have to saw in there we go wiggle it around and they go oh dear oh dear oh dear and sometimes I just cut it and pull it out that way yeah you do have tight gaps um so what you actually want to be doing with floss um is you want to be going down each side of the tooth um so for the floss you don't want to be going straight down cuz you'll hit the pillar um Can seesaw it in till it drops in and then gently kind of pulling it up and down the tooth in front and then once you've done that one move it while it's still in the Gap to the tooth behind and pull it up and down like that and then you can just gently seesaw it to get it out fair enough and that just helps you get more PL out okay and presumably like dental floss these are one go bin yeah so that these are slightly less good for the environment um I think you can get some slightly more eco-friendly designed ones but obviously they do cost more um my job I wouldn't imagine there's much recycling going on with an inter Dental brush either no there's not much either unfortunately pretty much everything is kind of made of plastic and Dentistry aside from the old bamboo thing that's on the market now but yeah it's not the most environmentally friendly but I don't get wrong I you know I I I think that we should be doing much more to reduce our plastic load and things like that but also there are some things kind of like so I would imagine that there's probably a greater burden um ecologically to somebody having bad teeth and having amalgam put in and all of the rest of that so I think this is probably a reasonable tradeoff yeah I think it's kind of a bit of a compromise so if you if you're needing loads of dental work doing that also comes with environmental costs as well mainly with single Plastics and like that so maintaining good oral health is not just good for you it's good for the environment as well yeah definitely well honestly I I fine I did not expect to enjoy this quite as much I really enjoy doing the uh the dental myth stuff but I did not expect to enjoy uh this quite so much well so there we go I mean I say I've really enjoyed this um and I think I've learned quite a lot I hope this has been beneficial for yourselves can can I ask a favor um you know this is kind of experimental for us if you if this has worked for you if you found this enjoyable um you know put some comments down below I mean this has been you know a brilliant experience for myself um and that's one of the reasons why we're sponsored by brilliant for this one because it's it is an experimental video so you know we want to do something for you guys but brilliant have come forth and said that they're happy for us to do a video like this hoping to bring something to you guys because of actually how brilliant Works uh brilliant is basically an education um uh platform and I've you know rejected advertising and things like that before on the channel the reason why I think brilliant works really well for this is we've talked about lots of things that you should do and the ways you do it everything that we say is backed up when you go all the way back through with random control trials or studies or statistics and when I went to medical school I wasn't that great at statistics I had to learn you 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