Buy an ultrasonic toothbrush and you don’t need to go for teeth cleaning anymore?

For veteran periodontitis patients, dental calculus is a nightmare that can never be eradicated. Although scaling and cleaning can remove dental calculus immediately, it cannot permanently eliminate the problem.

Is there really no easy and convenient way to replace teeth cleaning? Since teeth cleaning uses ultrasound to remove dental calculus, does an ultrasonic toothbrush have the same effect? ​​With an ultrasonic toothbrush, does it mean that we don’t need to clean our teeth anymore?

Although both ultrasonic scalers and ultrasonic toothbrushes use ultrasound to remove dirt from the surface of teeth, if we apply the idea that "discussing toxicity without considering dosage is foolish", it is not difficult to understand that "not all ultrasound waves can break up dental calculus". It is true that both tools use the principle of ultrasound, but the energy is different.

There are three common ultrasonic cleaning methods used in dentistry: the first method is to place the ultrasonic transducer directly in the liquid and be completely covered by the liquid, so that the ultrasound waves can propagate through the liquid. Ultrasonic cleaners (used for cleaning restorations, etc.) belong to this type; the second method is widely used in current ultrasonic toothbrush technology, which uses ultrasonic energy to excite the toothbrush head to vibrate, thereby generating microbubbles in the toothpaste, which stirs up the dental plaque on the surface of the teeth and gums; the last one is a high-energy device used only by professional dentists - an ultrasonic scaler, which transmits the vibrations to a metal tip, the so-called working tip.

The key to the problem is that the propagation speed of ultrasound depends not only on the vibration frequency, but also on the propagation medium - it has the strongest propagation ability in solids, the second weakest in liquids, and the lowest in gases.

When brushing teeth with an ultrasonic toothbrush, the propagation medium is a mixture of water, saliva, liquefied toothpaste and the bubbles they carry, so the ultrasonic waves will propagate through several liquid-gas interfaces. Obviously, the ultrasonic intensity of an ultrasonic toothbrush is not only lower than that of an ultrasonic cleaner, but also significantly lower than that of an ultrasonic dental scaler.

In fact, for tartar that is tightly attached to the surface of teeth, even if you use an ultrasonic toothbrush, you have to adjust it to high power to remove it. Using an ultrasonic toothbrush to remove tartar is really overthinking!