A Dentist's Lament

We are ambivalent in our feelings toward that section of the media devoted to hawking dental hygiene products. We welcome the little asides recommending that people visit their dentist but sometimes deplore the rest of the message. Arguably more acceptable than those commercials for products touted to address a host of women's personal bodily functions and certainly more believable than, say, those for used cars, still, dental ads are like having a rich but very eccentric uncle. He's the one who is apt to embarrass us to death at any time, yet also has the potential to enhance and further our own agenda.

So we tolerate the excessive claims and extravagant promises, accept the free samples and colorful literature. At the same time, we shy away from embracing the blatant commercialism and keep our own counsel.

Take toothpaste, for example. In spite of our personal beliefs and the public pronouncements of the American Dental Association on the matter, toothpaste manufacturers are always on full red alert for any ingredient, no matter how bizarre, to galvanize a gullible public. No matter that the only significant addition to toothpaste in the past 100 years has been fluoride. Fluoride, unfortunately, is as common as dirt and is in everybody's product, so it has little advertising value. The past few years have seen a constant parade of multicolored gels, peroxides, baking sodas and "tooth whitening additives," none of which has any scientific proof of efficacy. The old "4 out of 5 dentists recommend" bit has been done to death, but the packaging of the product is sometimes innovative, accompanied by equally innovative pricing.

You've got plastic tubes that refuse to stay rolled up. There are stand-up pump cartridges, screw-on caps, snap-on caps, simultaneous squirting of two ingredients to be mixed together in your mouth and, of course, The Promises. Ah yes, The Promises. Your tartar is controlled, or at least seriously restrained. Clean, sparkling white teeth and breath like a spring garden are yours for the asking. Likewise, firm, pink, healthy gums and a love life so fervid that suitors have to take a number just to get near you. Fantastico! Just what we had in mind ourselves, with minor reservations.

As dentists, we can but shake our heads in wonder. We know that if your teeth were beige before brushing, they're most likely to be beige after. The toothpaste companies know this, too, but the word "white" carries so much cachet, their judgment gets clouded. They never stop to think that you could do a better job with a bottle of White-Out from the local stationery store.

Many dentifrice companies also offer their own version of a toothbrush. It's a natural pairing, like selling shoelaces with shoes, tires with wheels, belts with pants. The same advertising people who have been fantasizing about toothpaste can now couple their knowledge of human frailties to the art of retailing toothbrushes. And the public is ready. Not believing that a toothbrush is a toothbrush is a toothbrush, they are eager to embrace any new angle in the handle; tufts on the end, on the side; flat; curved; blue centers; serrated, escalloped; and in fluorescent pink, plum and cherry apple red. It can be battery-powered, solar-powered, or belt-driven from a hamster's exercise wheel. At a substantial discount, they will sell us these brushes by the bulk and send us tons of literature so we can give them away to our patients.

It's a nice symbiotic relationship. And we can't complain; we both have the same goal with a slight variation: They're trying to make a living, and we're trying to prevent the troubles that provide us our living. Hey, if we were all that smart, we'd be lawyers.

The mouthwash people found out this was a heck of a system, and they have done the toothpaste people one better. Capitalizing on the fact that the human mouth is, to put it delicately, a cesspool, they have featured in their TV ads a colorful depiction of the microbial horror that resides there. Every imaginable germ in every histological configuration you can think of is rampant on the screen doing the backstroke, crawl, butterfly and breast in demented patterns and colliding with one another like bumper cars in an amusement park. Suddenly a tsunami of the company's product sluices over the scene, and the bugs are quicker to throw up their cilia and pseudopods and expire than those equally unhygienic bugs in the RAID commercials. You are then encouraged to get on with your life, germ-free for upward of 30 seconds or so.

Sort of hanging around on the advertising fringes are the denture adhesive and cleanser people. The denture cleaning ad people obviously believe that showing real dentures being soaked is pretty gross, so they favor rectangular blocks of what appears to be chalk dunked in their product with stains disappearing as if by magic.

The adhesive folks are even more chaste. They figure they can get their point across, namely that their paste is the equivalent of industrial cement and can attach to pencils and fingers with aggressive ease. Ergo, by the same token, it must follow that their dentures, discreetly hidden from the viewer, must stick to the gums with gratifying tenacity. Would that the company could turn its attention to a solvent for this stuff, which defies Brillo pads and fire hoses to dislodge it from both denture and gums.

It must drive the ad agencies up the wall when leading dental authorities go public with the opinion that, given a choice of either a toothbrush or floss to maintain oral health, floss would win hands down. Furthermore, it's the brush that does the trick, not the paste; and even with the brush, it's the amount of time in use rather than the design that's important.
How long have we been saying that? Not long enough apparently.