Dental Fossing: A Case Study

Normally we will advices our patients to visit the dentist every six months for a routine checkup, do some teeth cleaning and likely give a lecture about the importance of flossing. However, many dental patients, the advice travels in one ear and out the other much like, well, dental floss gliding between the spaces of your teeth. Thus, the question is whether dental flossing is really important and give benefit outcome or can cause redundant to the patient? In fact, dental flossing may not yield the protective benefits like we've been told to expect.

Since 1979, the federal government in the U.S. has recommended daily flossing, but by law these dietary guidelines, which are updated every five years, have to be supported by scientific evidence. Surprisingly and without any notice the federal government dropped flossing from its dietary guidelines this year (2016), telling the Associated Press that "the government acknowledged the effectiveness of flossing had

First, due to limited number of studies provide data on the effectiveness of flossing and toothbrushing compared to toothbrushing alone. Many studies compare floss with another interdental aid (2, 16–22). Warren et al. wrote that studies that have compared flossing with toothbrushing have found that their combined use produces no clear benefit. In additon, it is very difficult to dissect the marginal, additive effect of flossing. Thus, we would need a significantly higher number of participants in clinical trials to be able to detect these small differences. Secondly, most studies on flossing were associated with moderate-to-high risk of bias. If we conclude that flossing is not effective based on low-quality studies, we are making incorrect conclusions. The only way to address this issue is to conduct high-quality, long-term randomized trials that can be very expensive and time