ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

So I was checking out my newest subscriber’s blog last night, and she has an entry about something I’ve been meaning to discuss for freaking ever now, but I only think about it when I’m actually brushing my teeth, and then I immediately forget so I never hold on to it long enough to actually write anything.  If you’re too lazy to click over and see what she wrote about, the gist of it is that she timed herself brushing her teeth for two minutes and discussed it a little. 

Kathy didn’t say she has an electric toothbrush, so I’m going to just operate on the assumption that she has the traditional plastic with plastic bristles, which is the kind everybody has been using since the dawn of time.  I think that if Pontius Pilate and Coronado practiced any kind of dental hygiene whatsoever, it was probably of the Oral B persuasion.  

And I think that two minutes is a perfectly reasonable amount of time to brush with a traditional nonelectric toothbrush.  

But a while back I saw a TV commercial for an electric toothbrush with a timer for two minutes that would beep to alert you to when it’s OK to quit brushing.  I have one of those cheap Crest or Colgate battery-operated toothbrushes that you buy for $10 or whatever at Target.  And although they’re totally cheapass, those things spin fast, assuming your batteries aren’t dying.  I would say that the brush head operates up to 5 times faster than regular brushing and probably even more than that.  And I’m betting the fancy $100 one works even better.  

So based on that, I’m thinking that two minutes of superfast electric toothbrush brushing amounts to a lot more brushstrokes than two minutes of old-fashioned manual brushing.  So I think that the manufacturer of this toothbrush with the fancy timer could be encouraging consumers to engage in dental practices that are philosophically unsound at best, and dangerously enamel-abrading at worst.  

Anyway, that’s what I think about tooth-brushing.