> If you look up academic studies on flossing they nearly all say the same thing, it doesn’t prevent cavities more than brushing and the studies normally end with “well flossing isn’t hurting anything so might as well keep doing it”.
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.