How to Brush Your Teeth and Clean Your Mouth - a Holistic Dentist's Guide transcript

hello I'm Dr Michelle Jorgensen at Total Care Dental and wellness and I want to teach you how to take care of your mouth now you might think well my mom taught me this I know how to do it but there are some simple things that people don't know that really make a huge difference in how healthy your mouth stays and what I'm talking about taking care of your mouth I'm not just talking about your teeth I'm actually talking about your gums I'm talking about your tongue I'm talking about this whole thing here so let's walk through this it's not complicated there are just some little important pieces that you may need to add the first is let's talk about what your mouth condition may be like even when you go to brush your teeth when you have a lot of acid in your mouth the teeth are soft and that's actually the worst time to brush your teeth I tell people this if you've thrown up if you're pregnant and throw up the worst time to brush your teeth is right after that's happened because the teeth are going to be softer at that point the same thing happens if you've eaten a lot of acidic Foods so you don't want to brush your teeth at that point sometimes even in the morning we're a little acidic because we've been detoxing at night so what I recommend is actually starting with a mouth rinse now that might sound a little weird but just a little just a little to try to alkalize your mouth and balance things a bit so just rinse some around swish them around if you feel like your body is very acidic now how often do I do this first not very frequently only if I really feel like yeah things are off for me I usually don't start with the rinse but that is something if you feel like you are acidic you should start with let's start talking about how to brush the teeth now of course everybody knows how to do this but I want to show you a few little tips and tricks first of all what toothbrush should you use always soft make sure you're using something with a soft bristle on it I joke that the only thing you should use a hard toothbrush for is to clean the toilets and the oil on your driveway why because those bristles can be very abrasive to your teeth themselves and we don't want that to happen so a soft bristle toothbrush use the correct way is all you need what's the correct way so when you hold the toothbrush you're going to put the bristles obviously towards the tooth but you're going to angle it slightly toward the gum so you can see here on my front teeth I'm angling it slightly upward you rotate it back and forth like this just slowly back and forth and then you sweep it down so you can see what that looks like now I'm going to move to the next section and do this all the way around typically I spend about a minute doing the front surfaces I'll spend another minute doing the back surfaces then another minute on the bottom and go around you don't have to use a mechanical toothbrush in fact if you use a rotary toothbrush some version of an electric toothbrush it will do a lot of that work for you when you put this on the tooth it's doing a lot of that work for you the idea is to get the plaque away from the gum and down to where you can spit it out I like burst toothbrushes but I also like Sonicare I also like Oral B why would I choose one over the other honestly it's personal preference they all have advantages and disadvantages the Sonicare has quite a large head the Oral B has a smaller head so if you have a small mouth choose the Oral B some people love the Sonicare because it feels like a traditional toothbrush I like the burst because it actually has a different vibration it feels a little softer in my mouth to me so it's the one I prefer whichever one you prefer that's what I want you to use what do you brush with this is really important if you look at a traditional tube of toothpaste I want you to look at the ingredients first of all I want you to see if you can pronounce all of those ingredients you're not going to be able to because there are things like surfactants and disinfectants and preservatives and sweeteners and coloring and all those kinds of things that don't do a thing for you or for your mouth or for your teeth they are there simply to preserve that product to make it foam up to make it colorful or taste sweeter none of those things are a benefit to your mouth or your teeth why would you add them in the good news is you don't have to anymore the other thing that is on that toothpaste too is a warning about fluoride it tells you right on there that if you consume too much it's a toxic Hazard for you and particularly for children so why would we use it you don't have to I've created a product that has something called hydroxyapatite in it what is hydroxyapatite it's this it's the mineral on the outside of the teeth this has hydroxyapatite in it so if your tooth is weakening if acid and just other things that happen in life are pulling the minerals from your tooth you get to put them back in there is a remineralizing product that's a mint flavor there's also the exact same product in Citrus some kids don't like the mint so these are great products to help keep your teeth strong to help prevent cavities and they even help re-mineralize when you have the start of a cavity there are a couple other options that you can choose from as well there is a whitening version it has the same re-mineralizing hydroxyapatite in it but it also has some other agents that help to clean and oxidize the teeth and make them a little whiter this is a sensitive version this has something called Arginine bicarbonate in it which has been shown through research to be very good at helping with sensitive teeth all of these have the same hydroxyapatite the same re-mineralizing potential that's going to be brushing so how long should that take you two minutes or so if you spend a half a minute on the front of the top half a minute on the front on the bottom and then switch to the insides about two minutes so you're into this maybe two and a half minutes if that now what comes next most people say you need to floss your teeth well I'm going to tell you that you don't have to floss your teeth yep I said it you don't have to floss your teeth but I do want you to get in between those teeth with something what are your options you can use floss there's all sorts of different versions I like some that have less of the products that the toothpastes have as well some of the colorings and the flavorings and things so there's some very clean versions of floss you can use my husband loves to use it on a floss holder because he said it's really hard for him to get back into some of those areas this makes it possible for him you can also use something called a go between or a proxy brush this is a little product that just goes in between the areas be careful with this one however because this can actually push the gums down I don't ever use these or recommend this unless it's a place that chronically gets food caught a place that you've had some old dental work done where things get stuck in there that's what this is great for another thing that you can use is a water pick so this is a handheld water pick it's really nice because it's really small there's enough water in here to do pretty much your whole mouth this is nice to use to kind of just clean everything out in fact I like to do this even before brushing sometimes one of my favorites though is something called a shower flosser it goes in the shower so that you can do a water picking action while you're in your shower it doesn't take any more time it doesn't make any more mess and you get a you know a little extra bit of shower time in which nobody complains about now what do I do I'm going to let you in on a secret that not everybody knows I actually don't do hardly any of these ever I floss on occasion but not every day why because my gums are healthy because I am using products that help my gums stay healthy what are those products one of the big things is mouth rinse I showed you the Mint one already there's also a citrus one for kids this replaces that bubble gum pink stuff that has fluoride in it that's really not good for the kids or their guts or their health this is a citrus version these are going to do a few things first of all they have hydroxyapatide as well I figure if you're going to put something in your mouth it might as well be building your teeth but they also have colloidal silver what is colloidal silver it is actually a broad spectrum antimicrobial what that means is it's going to help to balance the bugs and the cool thing about this silver that we use is that it's selective it doesn't pick the good bugs they're bigger they're stronger they're heartier and it can't kill them it picks the little ones which are the bad dudes so it's going to take care of the bad bacteria the bad viruses the bad fungus that's in your mouth and it's going to keep everything balanced if you are brushing the right way keeping cavities off of your teeth keeping plaque off of your teeth the gums stay healthy as well and you actually don't need to do a lot of cleaning in between the teeth just on occasion when something's in there the mouth keeps itself quite clean if you keep it clean too so that's the first thing is adding the rinse that's going to be after brushing the teeth now I recommend when I'm using the hydroxyapatite tooth products that you don't rinse after this also has hydroxyapatite so you can rinse with this after because it's going to be just delivering more hydroxyapatite to the mouth the last thing I do is tongue scraping there's a couple of different tongue scrapers and I'll tell you why I recommend tongue scraping the tongue is like a shag carpet it's covered in all sorts of they're called papilla and it has all these places that things can get caught so a tongue scraper is a very important part of a healthy mouth routine how do you use it this is a metal one you put it all the way back to the back of the tongue and then scrape forward you're going to see Gunk on it you're going to rinse that off you're going to do it again until no more Gunk comes there's also a very simple one that looks like this you just bend it that way and do it forward lots of different versions now all of these things sound like a lot but let's take it down to the very simple matter of the steps and how to do them and when if you're very acidic you're going to do a pre-rinse I don't do this very often you're going to brush two minutes make sure you're covering every surface and you're moving the plaque from the gum down into the mouth to spit it out you're going to use a hydroxyapatite product you're going to clean in between the teeth if you have places demo work that needs it if you have gum disease that you're working to treat you're going to need to do this right now but you may not need to do this every day if your gums and your teeth are healthy you're going to follow up with the rinse 30 seconds I find that sometimes if my tongue's a little sore sometimes I'll get with something called geographic tongue I'll actually leave it in the there a little longer so 30 seconds or so tongue scraping 10 seconds when you add all of this together maybe three minutes maybe four minutes total do you do this twice a day if you brush twice a day the rest you can do once a day if you'd like very simple very effective a few steps to a healthy mouth