Sunday 6 November 2011

heresy or wash your mouth out with soap

Generally, I don’t ascribe to the latest fads or scares in health and hygiene, though I do tend to be skeptical about the utility over marketing and salesmanship of most products and I am usually captivated by the ideas that present reduction and disenchantment with conventional wisdom and the vaunted over-the-counter industries. Some time ago, H shared with me a tract circulating the internet, I’m sure, about tooth care, and I took the prescribed regiment rather seriously because the researcher (who I am sure could also share a lot of conspiracy theories about the fluorine in tap water—I could as well) was not trying to sell anything or get one to radically change his or her routine, like freeganism or the anti-soaps league.
I tried and stuck with it, not be too vain about my teeth and questioning if anything should be brilliantly and unnaturally white—I found the tobacco and coffee stains tolerable, but since I exchanged red wine for beer and tried to combat the discolouration with aggressive, daily flossing, I could tell that I was doing damage to my gums and enamel. The researcher maintains that the teeth can heal themselves (we tend to forget that one’s biology is mostly smarter than we are, despite our micro-managing of the affairs of our mouths and skin) and the biggest obstacle against repair is angry teeth-brushing with tooth-paste. The glycerin in all toothpaste, which makes it foam up, sort of suffocates one’s mouth because it does not rinse away. Instead, the researcher recommends that one use a bar of plain soap and take vitamin C and calcium supplements. That getting rid of a chemical coating might make all the difference struck me at first like the fallacy of moisturizers for one’s skin--nothing of the fancy ingredients and nutrients are absorbed into one’s skin, nor would we really want them to be. I must say that my gums were very sensitive at first and I had a few painful mouth ulcers at first, and I wasn’t seeing results after just two weeks, as promised, but six weeks later, my gums do look healthier with no latent pain and the stains have been bleached away to a large extend, even some of the swaths of decay look like they have sloughed off. Dental health is important and hopefully people won’t follow quackery, but as with most matters of taking care of oneself, there is no magic potion and a lot of what is being peddled does little more than mask underlying problems and perpetuates the business of health-care.