Look at all the wives tales in the past that were semi-effective just because of placebo effects or like you say implementing a health measure (even if it is not directly effective) normally means you have better hygiene anyways.
The problem with flossing is that it is so easy to do wrong which is why only professional flossing has significant effects.
It’s worth people knowing that unless they are flossing on a professional level they aren’t necessarily doing anything to benefit themselves beyond what a mouth rinse would do.
From experience: I used to rinse AND floss, and the floss always came back with a little bit of organic matter which would’ve otherwise decomposed.
So arguing against floss in praise of mouth rinses doesn’t seem like such an obvious ‘just do it’ idea. It’s probably more nuanced than that. And you can always use the wrong rinse or rinse incorrectly.
That’s actually a misrepresentation of the studies. It gets pushed by journalists because contrarian “doctors are wrong” takes are very popular, especially when they tell people what they want to hear.
The issue with flossing is that it’s hard to rigorously study over the duration needed to provide significant results. You also can’t really construct a study where you ask one cohort to not study for a couple decades to see if they do worse, because that has ethical concerns. So we’re left with self-reported flossing activity retrospectives. The problem with those is that people who floss tend to have better hygiene and self-care overall, so now we can’t isolate flossing as the reason for better dental health over a lifetime.
> In the studies that do show flossing helps against cavities they are about professional flossing and not self flossing.
This is an example of what I’m talking about: There are studies out there that show positive benefits of flossing, but if you find someone aggressively searching for reasons to discredit flossing then they’ll always find a reason to dismiss the evidence. When the goal becomes to be contrarian or to disprove something, you can always find a reason to dismiss the studies.