Brushing baby teeth

[Mil]

Sorry if I sound dense but not sure how to clean my 9mth ds's two teeth! We don't live in UK and the pharmacy here has never heard of baby toothbrushes or toothpaste! Should I get a bit of finger gauze and rub his teeth with our toothpaste?

Thanks, we're not in West Midlands, so am being over anxious as usual!!

JJ, I just wanted to say how impressed I am too with your linky smiley, I had no idea we could do that (although logically, of course it's possible!)

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Re the calcium thing: yep, calcium is pretty bad like that. Most medicines shouldn't be taken with milk (many antibiotics included -- except those that explicitly say it's alright). And actually, if someone needs a calcium supplement, it shouldn't be given all at once. It's very hard for the body to absorb... the stomach acids simply aren't acidic enough to keep it in solution. Twice a day is recommended.

Anyway, it's probably not a good idea to put the fluoride in with the milk (or give it at the same time you're giving a calcium containing vitamin, etc etc) if you're worried about the child getting fluoride. And it's not a good idea to take drugs with vitamins or other things containing calcium.

BUT if your child ingests some sort of caustic agent, milk (anything with calcium) is a great choice. My husband is all for calling it "binding agent" which might be the proper term.

This is in general. Numbers can be supplied, of course.... Because you really want to know the solubility of CaOH, that's why! I'm curious now as to the normal pH of stomach acid....

Nor do we have to rely on "trust me I'm an enthusiastic amateur with access to a computer"

You know yourself how long it takes to get things published.You have in the past bemoaned the tardiness of journals in publishing. I would have thought someone such as yourself would be interested in what those at the forefront of caries research are saying right now instead of relying on internet searches.

Fluoride in large doses is poisonous.
Of course.
That is a meaningless comment.
Everything in large doses is poisonous.

Yeah to agree with Jasper, there's the whole peer reviewed thing. There is research presented at conferences -- things given as in progress. Some of fruitful, some of which will come to nothing. It's silly to take conclusions at that stage, although some will be right. After that, people refine, retry and rewrite and submit. Then resubmit, usually. Peer reviewed journals are a good thing (most cases, of course). BUT (I love writing that in caps), each study should be taken as a data point, not as an answer in and of itself. Not "we know something new" but "we have another piece to the puzzle". Reviews are very good. It still helps to look to the bias of the reviewers, but reviews are the only thing matters. Not that people shouldn't start acting earlier.. just that people shouldn't start judging earlier. Or something like that.

Had that rant in me for a long long time.

Rereading, it's kind of irrelevant.

Thanks JJ. For anyone interested ( and not been sent off to sleep) the reason the profs were so excited about adult toothpaste making a difference to caries rates was it is very difficult to get people to change their behaviour to NOT do something ( Eg "DON'T feed your kids sweets" )but much more effective to tell people to DO something particularly if it is just a simple change to what they do already.(ie "DO brush your kids' teeth twice a day with adult toothpaste" )

This is the same thinking behind today's healthy eating advice which urges us to actively consume more fruit and veg. "EAT five portions of fruit and veg a day" works better than "DON'T eat fried fatty foods"

To this end some (all?) Scottish health boards have a big campaign on right now to dish out free toothpaste with "adult" Fluoride levels to under fives. I have several hundred tubes of the stuff taking up all my cupboard space
Has anyone been given any?
Some pharmacies are dishing it out too.

JJ about your crown message further down - do you mean a screw post going into the bit of root that is still there or a screw implant where you have to get the root extracted first?

Love Mumsnet and love thes clever threads ... I am constnatly learning new things ...
Also ... so refreshing to see a polite and well researched argument going on with no bitchiness ... well done Jasper and Robinw!!
BTW ... am also bowled over by the smiley link ... will practice ...

Wow it worked .... he he he!

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jasper, we've been given some free adult toothpaste for dd (17 mos)but its vile! Cheap nasty very minty, even I don't like the taste. Also, there was no info. about why this toothpaste was being given out free rather than nice-tasting baby stuff. I'm afraid it came across as a rather cheapskate way of getting parents to clean their children's teeth. I know around here babies are weaned from double-strength formula onto Mars Bars and Irn Bru, I don't honestly think that the supply of a free tube of toothpaste with make any dent at all in the dental caries rate! How about putting fluoride in Irn Bru? (No....they'd all get fluoride poisoning, silly)

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Tissy good point - yes it is likely to be the same stuff - very minty flavour.
My kids don't like it either. But what else can healthcare workers do? Go into homes and stop parents feeding their kids sweets? We have been banging on about reducing sugar consumption for years but still kids ( particularly in Scotland) get loads of decay but now with this consumer orientated society the parents are blaming the dentists!!!
No time to write more - am drinking wine in the sun - which would you rather do??

Robinw I give up, count me out of this debate. Frankly I'm not interested in sweating the small stuff. I spend all my working hours and lots of my spare time caring about other people's kids teeth. It is just too much effort to justify myself here as well.

Stick to your own methods of sniffing out "the truth". You won't be far off the mark.

Ghosty, thank you from my 4yo for that link

jasper- my point (not very well made, I admit) was that maybe a small tube of nice-tasting toothpaste would work better than a huge tube of horrid stuff! Those not very motivated mothers might be more inclined to persist in cleaning their kids' teeth if the children seem to like the taste and cooperate! If it's a fight, they just won't bother.

Jasper, the screws, I think, are the screw into the bone type ones, titanium maybe? (Are there screws like that?) At any rate, it's a big deal and major thing-to-be-done from what he told me. My dentist gave me a pamphlet but I've lost it and didn't read it carefully because it was in German.

Anyway, also wanted to say the rant about journals, etc, was really tangential to this conversation and kind of precipitated by RobinW's comment about journals being behind the times. I was honestly thinking of a couple of other completely different issues while writing that.

And a deep bow for the linky smiley. How much fun is that? And just think how subversive it could be. Scroll over smileys from here on out....

JJ, agree about the linky smileys

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I am just never going to be able to ignore smileys now ...!!