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How to Use Electric Toothbrush

This series of toothbrush video goes through the 3 must-have tools to do the best job of cleaning your teeth!

Tool 1: Electric Toothbrush

 

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Part 1

Tool 1: The Electric Toothbrush 

Part 1 Electric Toothbrush Video 1: Why do we need to clean our teeth?

Part 1 Electric Toothbrush Video 2: How to use electric toothbrush?

Part 1 Electric Toothbrush Video 3: Brush along with Dr Carla in real time!

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How to use an Electric Toothbrush

Why do we need to clean our teeth?

How to use electric toothbrush - How to brush your teeth with electric toothbrush

how to use an electric toothbrush 

Tools for Teeth Cleaning Series
Electric Toothbrush Video 1 Part 1

Electric Toothbrush

Dentista Dental Centre Morley

Tools for Teeth Cleaning Series by Doctor Carla - Electric Toothbrush

Electric Toothbrush video Part 1 Electric Toothbrush

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Transcript

Hi guys, Dr Carla here... today we are going to be talking about the best way to keep your teeth clean.. this is the first in a three part series about the electric toothbrush.

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Intro

 

Now, you might be wondering... what is the whole point of keeping our teeth clean, why is it important to do a good job? Well, the whole reason that we are cleaning our teeth, we have one aim... and that is to remove as much plaque as possible. You might be wondering... what is the plaque? Well it's the soft stuff that sits on your teeth and its tooth coloured, so if you ever scratch your tooth, it's and you get that white furry stuff off... or if it even feels furry to your tongue, that is plaque.

 

What does plaque do? Why is it so bad? Well, plaque is responsible for the two main problems that you can experience in your mouth.

 

So the first one is dental cavities. A dental cavity is also known as decay, and when you have a dental cavity or decay in your tooth, it means you have a hole in your tooth. That is bad for quite a few reasons, which we can do another video later on that.

 

The other thing that plaque is responsible for is gum disease. So gum disease can either be gingivitis, which is a swelling of a redness of the gums. That may present to as when you brush with your toothbrush, you get some bleeding. The other thing that plaque makes worse is something called periodontitis and that is when you have not just swelling of the gums, but also it can affect the bone that supports you whole tooth.

 

So that's what plaque does and that's why when we brush we want to remove as much plaque as possible.

 

The first tool that we are going to talk about is... you may have guessed it, the toothbrush. Studies have shown that the electric toothbrush remove significantly more plaque than a manual toothbrush. I agree with this completely. I for many years was using a manual toothbrush, because I thought, after all I'm a dentist... i have pretty good skills and I should be fine. When I made the switch however, to an electric toothbrush, I noticed a significant improvement in the amount of plaque removal. So if you can, I highly recommend that you start out with an electric toothbrush over using a manual toothbrush. We will get into how to brush with electric toothbrush in the next video. Please continue our journey into the electric toothbrush and how to use an electric toothbrush.

How to brush your teeth

How to Brush your teeth with electric toothbrush

Tools for Teeth Cleaning Series
Electric Toothbrush Video 1 Part 2

How to brush your teeth with an Electric Toothbrush

Dentista Dental Centre Morley

Tools for Teeth Cleaning Series by Doctor Carla - Electric toothbrush

Electric Toothbrush Video 1 Electric Toothbrush, Part 2 How to Brush your teeth with electric toothbrush

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Transcript:

How to brush with electric toothbrush? What we really are aiming to do when we brush our teeth with the electric toothbrush, or even a manual toothbrush if that's what your using, is to cover every surface of our teeth with the electric toothbrush and make sure that it's there for enough time to clean the plaque off. 

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If you imagine that plaque is very sticky.. you can think of it like some grease on a plate. If you just kind of dip the plate into the detergent water, and you pull it out, the grease is still there. You need to actually scrub it a bit using the sponge for that to come off. So it's the same with our teeth. We need to make sufficient contact with the electric toothbrush with all the surfaces of our teeth because the plaque will cover every single surface. 

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Not just the front, not just the insides, not just the biting surface, but between the surfaces of the teeth as well. 

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Teeth are not just flat square objects, so it's important that you make sure you 'do the curve' for each tooth with your electric toothbrush because a tooth is kind of curved like this (Dr Carla cups her hand to show a curved surface), so that your electric toothbrush does the front, but it also curves all around the front surface of the tooth. If you just hold your electric toothbrush on the front.. and you don't do the curves, then that plaque will stay there, and that makes it that you have a higher chance to get cavities between your teeth.

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So I am going to demonstrate that action when demonstrating how to brush with an electric toothbrush, quite exaggerated so that you get the idea. We go across like this (Dr Carla puts the electric toothbrush on the front tooth, the electric toothbrush is starting from the right of the screen to the left) and we go into the curve (Dr Carla moves the electric toothbrush in a curving action.). If we are looking from the top, like this (Dr Carla shows the curving action from right to left from a top view). As we go to the tooth behind.. like that (Dr Carla again does the demonstration of using the electric toothbrush from right to left in a curving motion, for the tooth behind). So that way we are getting right around those curves.

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So the next action that you want to make sure you are doing, after you've done the curves.. is that you sufficiently cover the whole up and down surface of the tooth. So up and down (Dr Carla demonstrates the motion by placing the the electric toothbrush at the end of the tooth, then going with the electric toothbrush up in one motion to the top of the tooth to the gum). You actually want to feel the electric toothbrush going over the gums. Okay, so you should feel the electric toothbrush making contact with your gum (how to use electric toothbrush).

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Now, if this is something that you don't normally do, and you've just started brushing with a electric toothbrush like this and brushing over the gums.. then you might notice a bit of bleeding. Don't stress, that doesn't mean that you are damaging your gums at all, it's just that there is a little bit of inflammation there. After you brush with the electric toothbrush like this (the way demonstrated), over the gums for a few days, then that bleeding should completely stop. If it persists, then that's a good sign to come in and see the dentist, to get it checked out. 

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The next action to keep in mind when you are learning how to brush your teeth with an electric toothbrush is to make sure that you don't scrub. The electric toothbrush does all that action for you. The electric toothbrush either does this (moves left the right in a circular motion) or some of the sonic electric toothbrush ones do more of an action like this (vibrating motion). Your job is to hold the electric toothbrush with sufficient pressure and sufficient time in the right position. So you don't want to be doing lots of this with the electric toothbrush (scrubbing action), and quick movements. You want to be holding the electric toothbrush, and then making sure you do the whole up and downs so the electric toothbrush goes over the gums... and doing that left and right and getting the curves. So that's how you do the fronts of the teeth with the electric toothbrush. Then you have to make sure you brush the biting surfaces with the electric toothbrush, which is the top and bottom of the teeth on the inside, so like this (Dr Carla then puts the electric toothbrush on the biting surface of the tooth and then puts the electric toothbrush inside for the inside of the teeth). Then you want to brush the insides. 

That curve that is on the front of the tooth... is also on the inside of the tooth. (Dr Carla then demonstrates brushing the curve on the inside of the teeth with the electric toothbrush). Also down the bottom. 

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You really want to make sure that you can feel those bristles on the gum and you can feel the bristles getting into all the curves of the teeth.

  

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Brush with me!

Electric Toothbrush - Brush with me!

Tools for Teeth Cleaning Series
Electric Toothbrush Video 1 Part 3

Electric Toothbrush: Brush With Me

Dentista Dental Centre Morley

Tools for Teeth Cleaning Series by Doctor Carla - Electric Toothbrush

Electric Toothbrush Video 1 Electric Toothbrush, Part  3 Electric toothbrush: Brush With Me

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Transcript:

One of the trickiest things about plaque is that it's tooth coloured... you can't actually see it. So for our demonstration today, I'm going to be using something called.. disclosing solution. If you come into see us at Dentista Dental Centre, and we do a check up and a clean for you, then we use this disclosing solution as part of our Airflow! guided biofilm therapy cleaning technique, as part of the protocol. 

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I haven't brushed my teeth since last night, it is now about 1pm of the following day, so let's see what the damage is. 

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I have my disclosing here and I'm just going to paint it on all the surfaces of my teeth and i'll rinse it off. What is left will be where the plaque is. So anywhere that shows purple after I rinse out is where there is plaque that we need to clean off. 

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Here we go (Dr Carla starts to put on the disclosing solution to cover all parts of her teeth). 

  

So you can see that I have quite a bit of purple down here (lower front teeth towards the gum area) and there is a little bit here (top front teeth in between the two top middle teeth). I have a little divet or a notch in that tooth which is a protected area for the plaque to hide out in. I have some around those curves that I was talking about in my back teeth. 

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The reason I have quite a lot here (Dr Carla points to the bottom front teeth), is because these bottom front teeth were actually traumatised when I was a baby, and when the enamel formed, it was all rough like this (Dr Carla makes a wavy sign with her hands demonstrating the rough surface of the bottom teeth). So it's not a smooth surface. 

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So if you have a similar case where you have teeth that are not very smooth or if you have got teeth that have got fillings in them or crowns or anything... any area where it's not completely smooth or where there's a join of a filling material or a crown to your tooth, that is a nice little 

nook that the plaque can get caught in. Imagine it's similar to under your fingernails or in grout or any kind of seam that always seems to get more dirty than a flat smooth surface. 

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Now let's clean it all off. You can brush along with me in real time. How to use an electric toothbrush

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This electric toothbrush here is an Oral B one. This area here (the top of the electric toothbrush before the brush extension) will actually light up red I'm putting too much pressure. So that's really good feedback. Here we go

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Electric Toothbrush Video: How to brush with electric toothbrush

(Dr Carla now uses the electric toothbrush and brushes for 2 minutes, showing how to brush with an electric toothbrush, using the curve technique and brushing all surfaces of the tooth. During the brushing time, there is one period where she uses too much pressure with the electric toothbrush and the light turns red).

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Let's have a look... see if there is any purple left. You can see that all the purple that was around the front grooves of the teeth are gone... and the same around that little notch. So you can see how effective the electric toothbrush is given if you:

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1. Hold the electric toothbrush in the right spot for the sufficient amount of time

2. Do the correct movement with the electric toothbrush, so you cover the whole tooth up and down, and getting into the curves of those teeth.

3. Don't use too much pressure when using the electric toothbrush.

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At one point using the electric toothbrush, the little red light went off, and that was a good indication that I was pushing too hard. If you're one of those people who's toothbrushes bristles splay out at 90 degrees after a couple of weeks of use, then that is way too much pressure. The bad thing about that is that you can abrade your tooth structure and you can also abrade your gums and wear them away. (This is similar to the section below Can you over brush your teeth... less pressure!) When the bristle on the toothbrush is on the side like this, it's not actually effective at cleaning the tooth surface. The effective part of the toothbrush bristle is the tip. If your electric toothbrush bristles have gone sideways like this and you're brushing the side, you are not actually doing a great job of cleaning. If that's the case then maybe you can try out one of these electric toothbrush that has the pressure sensor. As soon as you start to see the bristles splay out... ditch that brush and put a new one on.

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That concludes the first of our 3 part series on how to keep your teeth clean with the electric toothbrush. Hopefully you found that information useful and if you were doing those techniques already.. great! If not then try and implement them next time you brush your teeth with your electric toothbrush and we will see you for the next 2 parts of the how to keep your teeth clean series... see you then.

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Can you over brush your teeth

Can you over brush your teeth? It may sound like a strange question but is brushing your teeth the same as everything else? Is there too much of a good thing... can you over brush your teeth?

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So it turns out the answer is YES. If you over brush your teeth this is called toothbrush abrasion and it can actually be quite a problem. We must remember that at the end of the day, brushing your teeth, especially brushing your teeth with an electric toothbrush is still a physical frictional activity... and if you over brush your teeth with any toothbrush, electric toothbrush or manual toothbrush, you can wear down the protective enamel of your teeth and damage the. It can also cause sensitive teeth and sensitive gums.

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So what is the magical number when brushing your teeth can cause harm? Most dentists agree that you should not brush your teeth more than 3 times a day. Twice a day, once in the morning and once at night is optimal. If you are really keen, feel free to brush 3 times a day: morning noon and night... but don't overdo it

Can you over brush your teeth? Yes you can... so like everything else in life, brush your teeth in moderation. We hope you both enjoyed and leaned something about brushing your teeth with an electric toothbrush.

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How to use electric toothbrush - How to brush your teeth with electric toothbrush

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