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Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Dental Plaque But Nobody Told You Before Now |
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What “plaque” is NOT! Plaque is not food, not tartar, not stains, or anything like that. What “plaque” IS! Dental plaque is a biofilm -- a community of living bacteria -- that collects on your tooth surfaces and organizes into a sticky film containing toxic bacterial waste products. The germs involved live normally in people’s mouths and can not be killed by mouthwash, toothpaste or Bourbon (sorry). Here are some facts about the germs in the biofilm called dental plaque. 1. The little bugs are super small. Millions of them can fit on this dot ( · ). 2. Germs have an amazing reproductive life and you really must consider their birth rate excessive. Under the right conditions, one germ can divide itself into millions in an hour. 3. Plaque germs have a life style that permits them to thrive without much oxygen. This allows them to continue doing their thing when they are tucked down into your gum crevices, where there is little air. In fact, they prefer it there. 4. Germs love almost every kind of food we eat, but they consider sugar and other simple carbohydrates to be gourmet food. Plaque germs will eat continuously, if you feed them. 5. Just like you and me, when plaque germs eat, they have to dispose of some wastes. They do this all over your mouth, and some of the wastes are unhealthy for your tissues. This is also kind of unesthetic, if you think about it. The wastes damage gum tissues and tooth surfaces. 6. It takes the germs about 10 to 20 hours in most mouths to organize themselves into harmful plaque (they do this by secreting sticky films that glue them to your teeth). So if you disrupt the colonies more often than that, you can keep any damage to a minimum or even avoid it. 7. If you leave plaque alone for a while, it will harden into tartar (dentists call this material "calculus”). You need us to remove this for you. A patient once said, during her initial plaque control education visit, “Now I get it. Tartar is calicified plaque dung.” Exactly right. You get rid of dental plaque by cleaning it off your teeth, both above and below the gumline. How you do this, and what tools you use to do it with, matters a lot. A poor technique or inappropriate tools can cause damage to your gum tissues and tooth surfaces, and may not even be effective in the first place. We will absolutely and definitely show you how, and we’ll tell you about effective and safe things to use. When we do this showing and telling, please pay attention. Your teeth and gums depend in it. |
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