In 2007 I was experiencing tooth sensitivity like crazy. I couldn’t smile in cold weather without my teeth hurting. Cold foods, hot foods–everything hurt my teeth. I tried remineralizing pastes from the dentist, special toothpastes. Nothing seemed to help. My teeth HURT.
Miraculously, one day, they got better. But how?
After thinking about what I was doing differently, I realized that I had switched toothbrushes. Previously, for years I had been using the toothbrushes with the rubber/silicone cups and bristles. But then once I switched to a toothbrush with simple soft bristles, my tooth sensitivity improved within days. Switching to a “soft” or “ultra soft” bristled head helped even more.
Ever since I switched toothbrushes, tooth sensitivity has not been a problem for me. Every once in a while, though, I’ll end up using a rubber-bristled brush (sometimes I’m traveling and forget my brush or my regular toothbrush is worn and I’ll use the freebie from my dentist in a pinch) and each time, I can feel the tooth sensitivity pop back up within days. Switch back to the soft bristles–all better.
This is just my anecdotal experience–there are no studies on the effects of rubber/silicone bristles in toothbrushes on enamel. There’s no mechanism that I can explain–just my own personal experience. But I wanted to start a discussion about it, because I think it’s something that should be looked at further. We like the idea of getting our teeth really cleaned with those “advanced” toothbrushes, but perhaps we need to be a bit more gentle on our teeth to let them remineralize. And before you invest in special toothpastes, treatments, dentist visits, and supplements, the answer to your tooth sensitivity problem could be a very simple change.