Bad oral health increases your all-mortality risk

As a recent convert to using an electric toothbrush full-time, I was surprised to read recently in the New York Times, in bold, that "You don't need an electric toothbrush" in their article "What Dentists Wish You Knew".

I'm a recent convert to using an electric toothbrush full-time. I've flirted with them in the past but found them more inconvenient than using a simple everyday manual brush.

As a convert, I wished I had been using one for the last 20 years, as I now see more debris being loosened, and my gums feel much better. My experience with an electric toothbrush over the last 6 months made me wonder why the NYT would advocate against powered toothbrushes when it could have been neutral, and perhaps even in favour.

I wanted to know what independent research has concluded about the benefits or otherwise of electric toothbrushing and dental hygiene.

Here's what I found.

Strong evidence supports the use of powered toothbrushes for better oral health, i.e., slowing the progression of periodontal diseases such as gingivitis.

Better oral health delays progressive diseases of aging. In fact, older adults with tooth loss have a higher risk of cognitive impairment and dementia, with increasing risk with each missing tooth, according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Directors Association.  Source: nia.nih.gov

The pandemic, and working from home, has led to us spending long hours in awkward body positions, typically resulting in hunching our shoulders forward. NYC dentist Tammy Chen, says “I’ve seen more tooth fractures in the last six weeks than in the previous six years".

​It’s not just fractures but jaw pain, tooth sensitivity, achiness in the cheeks and migraines — sound familiar?
The simple, universal cure is an appeal to "better posture". However, this is not the cure, as "better posture" is often a prescription for the wrong disease. 
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In this post, I'll explain what the real cause it, and cures that work. This will not necessarily get you sitting up in a textbook posture, but it should cure you from damaging your teeth.

The state of our teeth has consequences for our overall health. This is especially important now.

If our dental hygiene is poor, then our immune system will waste resources fighting this threat, and have less resilience to withstand the coronavirus.

Don't stress your body by making it fight what's going on in your mouth when it could be doing better things for you. This is especially important as we get older and our immune response weakens.