Poor TL and I have been spending an inordinate amount of time at the dentist recently. I’d always thought he had wonderful teeth, as he never seemed to need a check-up and never mentioned any problems. Turns out he was probably ostriching. By the time the dentist saw him, things had turned nasty and, many appointments later, it’s still not over. When my check-up was due, I assumed I would breeze through it and be able to do plenty of smug preening for going regularly, using those stupid interdental doodahs and generally being a good girl. Sadly not. An Xray revealed a shy little bit of decay hiding round the back of my crown. The dentist unwisely murmured, ‘ah, probably the crown was put in a bit too close ….’
As you know, I missed my first appointment, or it missed me. Second time around it was a different dentist. I expressed my lack of appreciation for the whole business, especially as the crown (put in by this very same practice) seemed to have caused the trouble. As Child One said later, ‘why on earth did you say that to the dentist BEFORE he did the filling?’ A good point. I think I just wanted him to be aware that I was watching him. Though, of course, I couldn’t actually see what he was doing. Oh, you know what I mean. Anyway, he did the filling, after talking at great length about how nothing was his fault.
Anyway, the long and the short of it is that TL came home the other day with an article he’d found somewhere about how you could use mouthwashes to pretty much do all the teeth-cleaning work. I read it, and it sounded good. The chap who’d tried the technique went to visit his hygienist (how I hate them! Sorry, hygienists. But you are the traffic wardens of toothcare) and was told she couldn’t find even a speck of plaque. Well, I decided we should give it a go. So I bought vast bottles of UltraDex, Listerine Original and Floriguard, from Boots. What you do is swish around the UltraDex, give your teeth a quick brush with a standard flouride toothpaste, then swoosh with Listerine, finally finishing up with the Floriguard. It takes blimmin ages. And the Listerine is beyond disgusting. My mouth doesn’t know whether it’s being burnt alive or poisoned. Mind you, it will be worth it if it works.
Normally, I’d give you a link to the article so you could see it all for yourself. Thing is, I can’t find it anywhere. There is an American dentist called Dr Ellie who seems to have originally invented the technique, so if you Google her you’ll get all the gen. Good luck, and let’s hope this’s miles better 🙂 (see what I did there?).