Month: May 2014

1001 Uses For Dental Floss #24- Maybe They Should Promote It?

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Art by Jackie Rae Wloski

Warning: this is a rant.

I was at a dental convention today, here in Montreal, where I hang out. The commercial exhibits were busy selling everything dental under the sun, including lasers, digital radiography, fancy equipment, and, of course, the staples: toothbrushes and toothpaste. I walked up to the two booths that sell these last items, well-known brands both starting with the letter C. No floss on display! None.

I had to ask for it and then they suggested I buy some and give samples to my patients, which I do anyway (why I should have to pay these companies so I could do their marketing for them is a different question.) So I said: “Why do I never see your company ads ever (EVER!) mention floss, since you’re supposedly promoting good dental health. I see ads on television and in magazines for your all-in-one toothpastes that do everything: protect against plaque, tartar, bad breath, stain, decay, and anything else you can think of, except bring you on a better vacation or promote world peace, your fancy electronic, ultrasonic, super-vibrating toothbrushes with faster-to-accelerate-than-a-Italian-sports-car motors, but nary a mention of floss, which is probably the most effective means of keeping teeth and gums in good shape for a lifetime, with all the health benefits associated with that.” (See previous posts on this blog.)

I sometimes feel like a lone voice in the wilderness. I don’t have a big advertising budget like C and C. And it’s not like these companies would benefit in any way by people not flossing, since that’s what they sell and make money by. It is dental hygienists and dentists who have to pick up this ball and run with it, pushing this product, and are the ones who stand to lose out by having patients with good oral hygiene not needing their services as a consequence. Does this picture really make any sense?

In the pharmaceutical industry, there are a number of diseases not being addressed by research, because they affect few and the potential for profit is low after all the investment in time, money, and paperwork that’s required to develop a new drug. They’re called “orphan diseases”. Maybe floss is the “orphan drug” of the dental industry, not worth the effort of the manufacturers because their profit margin isn’t big enough, even though dental decay is the most prevalent infection in the world and could do with a little prevention.

The tobacco, fast food, corn syrup and sugar industries all try (or have tried in the past) to deny that their products are detrimental to health because their bottom lines depend on people continuing to buy them. The exact opposite is true for the makers of floss- their products are good for our health. So, whether you’re a capitalist (hooray for profits!) or a socialist (hooray for the people!) promoting floss is good for everyone (except maybe your dentist.)

So, C and C, and you know who you are and so do we, get out there. Make flossing the thing to do. You know how. Make us smile.

1001 Uses For Dental Floss #23 and 24- Useful Uses

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Happy Birthday to my daughter Rebecca
photo Wikimedia Commons

Uses That Are Actually Useful

You’ve probably noticed that not many of these posts include uses that most of you can use. Not a lot of us are yearning to escape from prison, blow up a plane, create a machine that incorporates artificial muscle power, or care that there is a floss flavoured like dill pickles. So here are a few tips for your extra floss.

I got these tips mostly from various sites on the web. One of these uses is well-known enough (it surprised me, really) that both my sister-in-law and a writing group colleague both suggested it to me (cutting a cake.)

These are all separate uses so this site qualifies for uses 23 through. This is not cheating, More useful uses may follow some other time, if I find some. So, for those practical types, here goes.

Use # 23- Cutting a cake- Take a piece of floss about 24 inches (about 60 centimetres, Canadians and the rest of the world) hold it at both ends and lay it across the diameter of the cake. Pull downwards with a gentle sawing or back and forth motion. Continue until you reach the bottom of the cake. The cake is now sliced into halves. By doing this again and again, the cake can be reduced to manageable slices, as many as you’d like to provide plenty of pieces for all your party guests.

Alternatively, by taking the floss and circling the cake with it until the two ends of the floss overlap, then pulling, the cake can be reduced to thin layers, which can then be lifted out and icing applied between each and the cake reassembled. Make a cake with 10 layers, if you want. Or more! Technically, this is Use #24.

After describing all this, I’m tired, and even worse, hungry. So I’m taking a break, slicing myself a piece of cake and pouring a glass of cold milk. And then I’ll floss my teeth. I’ll get around to other useful uses another time.

1001 Uses For Dental Floss #22- Flossophy

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photo source: Wikimedia Commons

To floss or not to floss, that is the question. Well, not really, for most of us, but since this blog is about floss, it is the question here. To brush, perchance to floss; Aye, there’s the rub (or the gum massage.)

Shakespeare didn’t know about floss, and probably not the toothbrush either, so he didn’t have to figure out this truly existential question and could luxuriate in dealing with simple things like political conflict, personal trauma, murder, the mysteries of existence, and the malicious application of power. Yet we, in this complicated age, when every action is questionable and every option has hordes of supporters and naysayers, have to make all these difficult decisions and arrange our personal world by priority of actions.

So, why floss? Health, say some. Others doubt the need for this activity other than to provide a topic for dental hygienists to start conversations with, before they spend the next forty minutes vibrating bits of your personal coral reef out from its safe haven beneath the warm waves of a saliva sea. Maybe it comes down to personal habit and our allotments of time, energy, and spirit. There is an association between good oral health and a person’s general level of health, but not necessarily a cause and effect relationship. The mouth is, despite it often being glossed over by physicians on their way to examining your throat and all things to the south of that, part of the body, and if the person under observation (you) takes good care of that body, by exercising, eating right, avoiding dangerous habits, and staying out of war zones and UFO landing sites, he or she might also be inclined to attend to the needs of their teeth, too. And the individual who smokes too much, is sedentary, eats indiscriminately, and is a risk-taker might also not value having clean teeth. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, but not necessarily the other way round.

Flossing can be almost a fetish too. Washing the hands multiple times during the day might be obsessive, and this condition could apply to the mouth too. So, there is a continuum, and where we place ourselves along it is by free choice, if there truly is such a thing, another hotly debated topic among philosphers, mathematicians, and theology sudents. Or perhaps the golden mean applies, something Shakespeare would recognize. Maybe that is the answer to the question. Or not.

Does the concept of floss truly exist, or is it a mental construct to deal, in a small way, with the ultimate limits of control we have over our lives, and give ourselves the impression, false or otherwise, that we can alter the passage of time, one day at a time, as the clock ticks on. What would Socrates say? Or Kierkegaard? Or Sartre? Or your mother?

I don’t know the answers to all these ultimately confusing ideas. What I do know, despite the over-thinking, is that flossing is important to do. At least once per day.

1001 Uses For Dental Floss #21- Fear of Flossin

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The Scream, by Edvard Munch

Odontolinonophobia- Fear of dental floss (This term is newly minted. You won’t find it in any dictionary or psychiatric textbook.)
No, not the title of a book à la Erica Jong. Let’s face it. Floss scares some people, but not as much as it does RJ Moody, who fears that he’ll decapitate himself while applying its fearsome threads to his mouth. He even wrote a poem about it.

http://www.writing.com/main/view_item/item_id/1920289-Fear-of-Flossing

You could probably sing it, to the tune of the famous western song Riders In The Sky.

Fear of Flossing

My head bounced off the vanity,
and rolled across the floor.
I saw the ceiling, wall, and tile,
and then the wall once more.
This view just kept repeating,
and my nose was getting sore.
The redundancy was killing me,
’til alas, I saw the door.

Out on the kitchen floor I rolled,
between the dining chairs,
and then beneath the table.
It was dusty under there.
I hadn’t noticed that before,
but I guess I shouldn’t care,
because I had bigger problems;
for example, cellar stairs.

Going down the hall was fretful.
All my sins I did confess,
’cause the cellar door was open,
as by now you probably guessed;
plus I always get religious.
when I’m facing such duress.
Then just inches from the stairs,
my lucky noggin came to rest.

Now while my glee was genuine,
it was also quickly spent,
as I recalled the minute prior,
when I was a taller gent.
Before I grabbed that length of
waxy string with minty scent.
Before I had my horrible, freakish,
dental floss accident.

© Copyright 2013 RJ Moody (UN: rjmoody at Writing.Com). All rights reserved.
RJ Moody has granted Writing.Com, its affiliates and syndicates non-exclusive rights to display this work.

Following up on our first Use for Dental Floss (escaping from jail), another fear of flossing involves the uncanny ability of some prisoners to adapt pretty much anything, including floss, as a weapon.

Palm Beach (Florida) County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw, despite several lawsuits by prisoners who were trying to change his mind, refused to allow them access to floss, claiming they could turn it into a weapon or a rope. See the article in the http://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2012/10/18/Sheriff-No-floss-for-inmates/UPI-95591350581330/.

In his blog, The Graveyard Shift, Lee Lofland describes several ways in which prisoners can use floss, toothpaste, and plastic floss containers to create rope, strangle each other, pass notes from cell to cell, and saw through jail bars (very slowly).

http://www.leelofland.com/wordpress/dental-floss-murder-weapon-and-tool-for-prison-escape/

It’s enough to make you scream from fear.