Isn't flossing not supported by science also, but all the news articles said you should keep flossing?
replies(11):
Flossing daily isn't necessary if you're an adequate manual brusher. Relatively few people are adequate manual brushers.
Buy a good electric toothbrush, floss periodically.
That's not a meaningful standard for any health intervention. If I'd apply everything to my body that wasn't proven to hurt I'd spend a hundred bucks every morning and two hours in the bathroom. If "it doesn't hurt" was sufficient basis for a recommendation our doctors would tell us to swallow homeopathic medicine every morning.
It seems pretty obvious that anything you apply has to have at least some measurable impact, otherwise you're basically in the same category as the supplement industry.
https://www.consumerreports.org/toxic-chemicals-substances/d...
https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/good-oral-healt...
It's demonstrable that something like a bean skin, lodged in your teeth, will erode the teeth touching it.
I don't do the dentist recommended 2/week but if I stop flossing for over a month I notice significant decrease in my gum health. It becomes excruciatingly painful to brush and this stage and my mouth is full of blood afterwards.
So I'm sticking to flossing pretty often now.
Only reason I'm being pedantic here is because if the study was in-fact looking at parachutes from helicopters, it could actually be plausible that parachutes had no improvements when used with helicopters. Most, if not all pilots, don't wear parachutes because there's not enough time to jump out of a crashing helicopter to deploy one and the blades would probably hit you anyway (unlike a plane which you could glide for some time, helicopters are notoriously more likely to fall straight like a brick)
This is a systemic review. A RCT would absolutely find a difference. The whole point of this satire is to point out that there's not always studies on what you want to know. "No randomised controlled trials of parachute use have been undertaken"
Flossing has absolutely been studied. Professional flossing seems effective at combating gum disease. Telling people to floss doesn't seem to be. It's unclear why (is it just compliance effects? are people educated on how to floss still ineffective? etc.)
I think the real point is that systemic reviews often will have a pretty tilted set of included studies, because they are influenced by what things researchers choose to study.
Indeed, you probably couldn't publish a study saying that parachutes work; it's not an interesting enough finding for publication. So the only stuff you'll find, in many cases, are studies that buck the prevailing wisdom.
But yes, the item you want studied might not have been studied. ("However, the trial was only able to enroll participants on small stationary aircraft on the ground, suggesting cautious extrapolation to high altitude jumps.")
They have much higher rates of these diseases, and recently in a court case the death of a farmers daughter has been shown to be caused by these pesticides.
It is a normal procedure to be able to safely land this way when power has been lost, and in some ways is safer than a gliding fixed wing aircraft as you don't need a runway to land on.
Of course catastrophic failure is possible in a helicopter where the rotorblades can't turn, and then autorotation won't work. But then if a wing falls off a fixed-wing aircraft, they generally can't be controlled (interesting exceptions do exist like with the Israeli F15[1]).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autorotation
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Negev_mid-air_collision
I used to do this periodically because I hated doing it. But as a result, plaque would build up. Especially on the front bottom incisors.
Eventually added it to my daily routine after the nth time being told to floss daily. And now my dental cleanings are more like spot checks.
I suppose it’s anecdotal and unique to everyone though. Something about mouth flora.
If you manage to do double-blind studies for every single piece of knowledge out there, kudos for you. There's nothing bad in this.
Anyway, it's on topic for several sidelines people are raising. But not on topic for the main article.
The saying goes that you only need to floss the teeth you want to keep.
If you think about it, a toothbrush will only clean 3 sides of a tooth. Top, outer side, inner side. Not the 2 sides facing neighbour teeth.
How on earth is it very important to clean those 3 sides but not the remaining 2? That just doesn’t make sense. If you think flossing is not useful, to be coherent, you must believe toothbrushing is not useful.
On the flip side, learn how to do flossing right to not hurt your gums. The floss must follow the shape of the tooth, and not be straight. (Ie. move along a U path.) Flossing in a straight line does more harm then good.
According to my dentist, you can damage your gums by brushing them too hard. I don't floss so he didn't address that, but in both methods, force is being applied to delicate tissue.
The point of brushing and flossing is to remove food particles. You don't have to abuse your teeth or gums to do that.
Anecdote. I went my whole life not-flossing, having occasional procedures until every molar had work done to it. I started flossing daily and the need for procedures stopped.
First I don't floss for a month. Then what looks like gingivitis shows up. And when I brush (normally -- not hard) after this, the sites that have the gingivitis bleed and are extremely painful.
If I don't floss my dentist notices immediately and tells me to floss more often because there's food and shit in there, hence why I tend to floss.