With this narrow scope of review, AP produced an article that undoubtedly brought them a lot of revenues from the use and re-use of their story, through royalties and licensing. With the click-baiting title of
“Medical benefits of dental floss unproven” they were able to capitalize on the media’s penchant to traffic in flavour-of-the-week medical stories, and as so often happens, many in the public saw or heard it without sufficient context.
As a result, the public were
treated to the usual sensational stories that featured news anchors jovially announcing that they felt vindicated for not flossing, or suggesting that there was possibly a nefarious reason for dentists to have been recommending flossing in the first place. And as a consequence, the very real and very earnest recommendations of dentists and other dental professionals, were tossed into the mill as fodder for this spasm of so-called reporting.
Unfortunately, what this also achieved was to erode the reputation of one of the cornerstones of common sense dental hygiene practices and, potentially worse, to undercut the perception of trustworthiness for dental health practitioners to their patients.
Not to mention that, as noted by
Kara Vavrosky, RDH, AP’s claim there were “no studies that show the benefits of flossing” is “patently false” based on research she was able to easily locate. Vavrosky concludes that “AP’s research was biased,” and that AP was “negligent to report such bias to the greater public.”
(source)
