Keeping Your Mouth Clean

What are the benefits of keeping my mouth clean?

Keeping your mouth clean helps prevent dental disease.

• Sticky plaque builds up on everyone’s teeth every day and this can lead to gum disease. The gum comes away from the teeth, making the plaque more difficult to clean away. This makes gum disease worse. You can stop gum disease starting by cleaning your teeth carefully.
• Just brushing your teeth will not prevent tooth decay. You need to brush with fluoride toothpaste. This helps the tooth mend itself after being attacked by plaque acids. Thorough brushing gets fluoride all around the mouth.
• Teeth also erode. This means they dissolve away when you have acidic food and drink too often. Rinsing acids away with water afterwards helps prevent erosion.

As well as cleaning your teeth and gums thoroughly, try to have sticky and acidic foods and drink less often.

How should I brush my teeth?

• Brush your teeth thoroughly twice a day with a soft-to-medium brush and fluoride toothpaste. Replace the brush when the bristles get out of shape.
• Put the bristles at the join between teeth and gums, pointing towards the gums using short circular movements.
• Brush all around every tooth, carefully making sure you can feel the brush on your gums.
• Don’t use too much force – give your teeth and gums a gentle scrub.
• Small children usually cannot brush properly until they are eight or nine so brush their teeth yourself. One way is to stand behind your child and tilt their head back so you can reach all the teeth.

How should I floss?

Dental floss helps you clean between your teeth. Your dentist or hygienist will tell you whether you need to floss. If you do, they will show you how to do it. You may need to practise in front of a mirror.

• Use about 18 inches of floss. Wrap the ends around the middle fingers of each hand, leaving two or three inches between the first finger and thumb.
• Gently slide the floss between two teeth and put it round one tooth, next to the gums, using your fingers.
• Move the floss up and down the side of the tooth several times.
• Do the same for every tooth.

Children do not need to use floss.

Bad Breath

What is it?

Bad breath is usually cause by bacteria in the mouth and is not a sign of general ill health. Sometimes, the smell comes from the nose.

Gum disease can cause bad breath. But you could still have bad breath with good oral hygiene and healthy teeth and gums. The smell then usually comes from the far back of the tongue. It gets stronger when you talk, as your mouth gets drier.

Most adults occasionally suffer bad breath. Perhaps a quarter of adults suffer from bad breath regularly. If you are worried about bad breath, please talk to your dentist.

Your dentist will:

• Work out whether you really have a bad breath problem; and
• Find out what sort of problem it is and help you deal with it.

What can my dentist do?

Make sure, before you see your dentist, that you have not done anything to hide the normal smell of your breath. Do not smoke, chew gum or use a mouth rinse, and avoid any sort of perfume. This will make it easier for your dentist to tell where any problem is coming from.

Your dentist might use a plastic spoon to gently scrape the back of your tongue and test the smell. There are also instruments which measure sulphur compounds in the mouth or swelling around the gums.

Good oral hygiene will usually be the answer to a bad breath problem. A scale and polish from your dentist or hygienist makes it easier for you to keep your mouth clean at home.

What can I do myself?

• Brush your teeth thoroughly twice a day with fluoride toothpaste.
• Use floss or other oral hygiene aids if your dentist or hygienist recommends them.
• Gently brush your tongue if it is heavily coated.

You can check bad breath by smelling the floss after you have used it. If there is a smell from a particular part of the mouth, clean that area with special care.

A mouth will smell less if it is moist. Chewing sugar-free gum can help with bad breath by increasing the flow of saliva. You might have a dry mouth because you breathe with your mouth open or because you are taking certain medicines. Your mouth gets drier as you get older too.

If you smoke, try to give up. You should do this not just to make your breath smell better but also to keep your mouth and gums healthy and to protect your general health as well.

Scaling And Polishing

What is it?

A “scale and polish” cleans your teeth very thoroughly.

Scaling removes the hard tartar which forms on your teeth like scale inside a kettle. You can’t remove it just by brushing your teeth. Scaling also removes trapped food and plaque containing millions of germs which can cause tooth decay and gum disease. Stains from coffee, tea, cigarettes or red wine are also cleaned away when your dentist polishes your teeth.

	A dentist dental or hygienist will scale your teeth. If you clean your teeth very thoroughly anyway, your scale and polish will take less time.

What happens?

There are two ways to scale teeth.

• Hand scalers – these come in different sizes and shapes, to reach different parts of your teeth. This is why you will see the dentist or hygienist changing instruments quite often.
• Electric scalers – these use very fast vibration with water. The water is sucked out of the mouth. A hand scaler is used to check whether the teeth are completely clean.

For polishing, your dentist will use a rotating brush or rubber polisher with toothpaste.

Scaling cleans above and below the gums. If you have gum disease, scaling needs to be deeper, around the roots of the teeth.

This is called “root planning”. Your dentist may give you local anaesthetic make it more comfortable.

Your dentist or dental hygienist will tell you about the best way to clean your teeth and gums thoroughly at home.

What are the benefits?

• Regular scaling and polishing by a dentist or hygienist helps keep your teeth and gums healthy by making it easier for you to keep your teeth clean at home. You should see and feel the difference.
• If your gums bleed when you brush, you may have early gum disease. Regular scaling helps to stop the disease getting worse
• Gum disease can cause bad breath, which you can prevent by regular scaling and cleaning your teeth thoroughly at home.

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