If the goal of toothbrushing and flossing is to remove bacteria and food debris from your mouth, hopefully an uncontroversial premise, it's pretty obvious how flossing helps.
Just flossing and carefully watching the action of the floss and the plaque is sufficient to demonstrate the benefit.
Sometimes your common sense is more than enough to make sense of the world, no ivy league double blind study required.
It's a question of return on investment. If spending the extra minute everyday saves a probable $10k over your lifetime due to dental work, then yes it might be worth it. But if it saves a probable $10, it might not.
The cost of the dental work pales in comparison to the value of keeping your natural teeth, which is going to be much much much higher than $10k over your lifetime.
Not flossing makes your dental visits longer as they scrape off all the plaque from in-between your teeth. Just avoiding that discomfort is worth it IMO.
I suppose you could skip going to the dentist altogether but that comes with risks of larger issues down the road.
Meta-analyses of RCTs do indicate flossing prevents gum disease, though, which is important. See another poster in this thread who suffered bone loss as a result of gum disease.
You're right though that there's no established effect on cavities.
Having said that, it's difficult to get people to actually floss, so there's a certain amount of uncertainty about the results of those RCTs, and whether participants were doing what they were supposed to be doing.
I think i read somewhere that the reason for this is that virtually all dentists agree you should clean your entire tooth, and the consensus is so universal that no one bothers to do controlled trials.
I would feel bad not cleaning half of the surface area at all anyways.
All else being equal, it's obviously better not to spend an extra minute or two doing something useless.
If you think it is not actually equal, and that scraping is indeed better, well say so and qualify your statement. You can even say that it's recommended by dentists, it's an authority argument but it surely is better than nothing.
I do think it’s worth the time. My teeth feel significantly cleaner after doing so and it removes stuff my brush can’t reach no matter how much I try.
I’m not sure why I have have to defend flossing of all things. I’m not trained in that field, neither are you, we should listen to the people who are and guess what? They almost all recommend flossing.
That argument was accepted with COVID vaccines, so why not now?
> That argument was accepted with COVID vaccines, so why not now?
Far from universally and even in the pockets where it was, at least some percentage did it just to be able to go back to doing normal things which were gated by government rules.
Don’t do anything blindly. They won’t be the ones bearing the cost if and when something goes wrong.
Nothing proves flossing is beneficial actually