Dental care is more than about maintaining a beautiful smile to flash in photos. It is inextricably linked to your overall health, the newest studies finding that dental health mirrors the condition of your whole body. And good dental care indeed might help prevent complications such as heart disease and stroke. Thus, it should be taken as seriously as the maintenance of the rest of your body. It starts at the beginning of your day every morning as soon as you pick up your toothbrush. Of course, there is the question of which type of toothbrush is best. There are presently three main options: manual, electric, and sonic. Following we’ll explore which of these is the best at maintaining a healthy mouth.
Manual toothbrushes have been around for a long time, though that doesn’t automatically mean it is the best option. As technology evolves, it makes sense that our ability to improve on older items continues to get better and better. Still, these toothbrushes are the standard, used by the majority of people. Aside from being the least expensive, manual toothbrushes are very effective at cleaning the outer surfaces of one’s teeth along with the gaps in between as long as the bristles actually make contact with those areas. This is the flaw of course as it assumes the user is willing and able to contact every area of the mouth.
Electric toothbrushes came about in the 1950s and attempt to replace the user’s motion with automatic motion powered by the toothbrush itself. At that, it is very efficient with current iterations vibrating the head of the brush between 3,000 and 7,000 strokes every minutes. Like normal toothbrushes, though, it still relies on the user to put in the work to get the brush into every spot because it can only clean what it physically contacts.
Sonic toothbrushes are the newest design and they reflect that in their ability to multiply the efficiency of electric toothbrushes by a factor of 10, vibrating anywhere from 30,000 to 40,000 strokes every minute. But does this efficiency result in better dental care? Well since the sonic toothbrushes produce so much motion, it helps push the saliva, water, and toothpaste into those harder to reach areas of the mouth that people might normally not contact with the bristles of electric or manual toothbrushes.
So, “pound for pound,” yes, using a sonic toothbrush will result in improved dental care if used for the same amount of time as electric and manual toothbrushes. However, adding flossing to your regiment will give you the same advantages of a sonic toothbrush – though less expensively, with more time and work.
So when it comes down to it, brushing your teeth, flossing regularly, and regular dental checkups are still the best recipe for success, regardless of the type of toothbrush you decide to use.
