Dental Care - Floss Your Teeth

Dr. Isabel Kelly: Hello! I am Doctor Isabel Kelly once again with Kelly Dentistry and we are here to talk about flossing, how to floss your teeth. We have different types of flosses. I am going to be using a dental tape on this patient right now. I am assuming that she has teeth that are very close together, but there is other dental flosses out there. There is a wax dental floss and there is the un-wax dental floss. I do prefer at the wax dental floss in that it shreds less easily. So, but I am distal tape will work very well for any teeth that are close together. So, we are going to use this today. What you want to start with is a 18-inch long piece of floss, or a very long piece of floss and then you are going to wind it around each middle finger in different directions. Then you are going to pinch with your first finger and your thumb on either side, just to hold floss firmly. Then as you go from one side of the mouth, lower left side to the lower right side or the upper left side to upper right side, you want to make sure that you wind and unwind each side of the floss, so that you get a new clean teeth of floss. Thats just really to prevent any kind of bacteria getting from one side of the mouth to the other side of mouth. Then once youve fit it between the teeth, you want to form a nice to C shape around the teeth into the gum. So, well demonstrate how to do that, so, with this patient right here. So, lets get started. So, I am going to show on her how to floss the teeth properly. So, we go -- really I would like to start in a very back of the mouth the very last tooth and then work my way forward, but since were trying to show you how to floss your teeth properly, well start with the up front tooth. So, you go between the teeth, either tooth and then you go from side, forming a C shape to side and really what you are doing is there is triangle of gum, your gum forms a triangle between your teeth and you are just trying to get round that gum and between the teeth and the gum and you do not want to lost, or cut your gum, which is really hard to do with floss, but you can do it.

So, again we will do it again. Then Ill have the patient do it for me, demonstrate for me, so can you do that for me? So, actually you want to wind around the middle finger. Sometimes you will have a hard time winding around the middle finger and then the end up winding around the first finger. You start to do it with the middle finger, but as long as you get a pretty close and then penetrate your first finger and thumb, yeah and then make sure you go all the way down on either side, so, you make sure you get in the gum because thats where the bacteria stays, so you try to move the bacteria and thats where some of the food collects. Thats how we floss our teeth.