Do You Actually Need to Floss?

The research is weak and misleading, yet dentists are adamant. So where does that leave us?

David H. Freedman
Elemental
Published in
6 min readJan 7, 2020

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Illustrations: George Wylesol

TThree years ago, the Associated Press published an article that appeared to discredit something most of us are told twice a year by our dentists. The article looked at 25 studies on flossing and determined they pretty much all failed to find solid scientific…

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David H. Freedman
Elemental

David is a Boston-based science writer. The most recent of his five books is WRONG, about the problems with medical research and other expertise.