7 Things Dentists Wish You Would Stop Doing to Your Teeth

Most dental damage is preventable. That is not a platitude — it is a clinical observation made in examination room after examination room, year after year. The frustrating thing is that a substantial share of the damage we see at Serenity International Dental Clinic is not caused by neglect. It is caused by habits that patients perform consciously, often regularly, under the impression that they are harmless or even beneficial.

When we explain the damage mechanism to patients, the most common response is genuine surprise. Nobody told them. They had no idea. They have been doing it for years.

This post covers the seven habits our clinical team most frequently identifies as the source of avoidable, recurring dental damage. Some of them will be counterintuitive. Some of them are things patients believe are actively good for their teeth. All of them need to stop.

1. Using Your Teeth as Tools

Teeth are remarkable biological structures — calcified, layered, precision-fitted — but they are designed for one primary mechanical task: breaking down food. They are not pliers, wire strippers, scissors, bottle openers, or package openers. When you use them as any of these things, you are applying forces to structures that were not engineered for those loads.

The specific damage patterns we see from dental tool use include:

Craze lines and cracked tooth syndrome: Repeatedly using front teeth to tear open packaging, rip off clothing tags, or bite through thread creates micro-fractures in enamel — craze lines — that eventually propagate into full cracks. A cracked tooth is one of the most unpredictable injuries in dentistry. Depending on where the crack terminates — above or below the gum line, reaching the pulp or not — the treatment required ranges from a crown to a root canal to extraction. There is no reliable way to seal a crack once it has propagated deeply.

Chipping and fracture: Using teeth to uncap bottles — a habit we see regularly — applies sudden lateral force to incisors that are designed to handle vertical biting loads, not sideways pressure. Even a single incident can fracture a tooth corner. Porcelain and composite restorations are particularly vulnerable.

Incisal edge wear: Patients who habitually hold objects in their teeth (pens, reading glasses, sewing needles) create concentrated wear patterns on the incisal edges of specific teeth — the two or three teeth that habitually bear the object. This wear is cumulative and largely irreversible without restorative intervention.

The solution is entirely behavioural: keep scissors and bottle openers accessible and use them. The dental cost of not doing so is invariably higher than the inconvenience of reaching for the right tool.

2. Chewing Ice

Ice chewing is one of the habits we encounter most frequently and which causes some of the most dramatic damage. It is common enough that it has a clinical name — pagophagia — and it is associated with iron-deficiency anaemia as well as with a stress-relief pattern in some patients.

The damage mechanism is not subtle. Ice is a crystalline solid with a hardness comparable to the biting surfaces of posterior teeth. When you bite through ice, you are bringing two hard surfaces of similar hardness into direct, percussive contact. The temperature differential between ice (typically 0°C or below) and tooth structure (maintained at body temperature by pulpal blood flow) creates rapid thermal cycling — expansion and contraction — at the tooth surface.

The combination of mechanical shock loading and thermal cycling is particularly effective at initiating and propagating craze lines through enamel and, eventually, through dentine. Patients who chew ice habitually over months or years present with a characteristic pattern of multiple craze lines across posterior biting surfaces, increased sensitivity, and a statistical elevation in acute tooth fracture events.

The damage is compounded if the patient has existing restorations. Amalgam and composite fillings expand and contract at rates different from natural tooth structure. A posterior tooth with a large filling that is repeatedly subjected to ice chewing undergoes differential thermal cycling stress between the filling material and the surrounding tooth — a reliable pathway to cracks and fracture lines that originate at the filling margins.

If you find yourself compulsively chewing ice, it is worth having a simple blood test to check ferritin and serum iron levels. The compulsion often resolves completely with iron supplementation if deficiency is the underlying driver.

3. Brushing Immediately After Acidic Food or Drink

This one is perhaps the most counterintuitive habit on this list, because it is the behaviour that looks most like excellent dental hygiene. Brushing after meals feels responsible. Brushing straight after orange juice or wine feels proactive. In reality, it causes direct, measurable enamel damage.

The mechanism: acidic food and drink temporarily soften tooth enamel. After exposure to acid — whether from fruit juice, carbonated drinks, wine, vinegar-based foods, or citrus — the surface layer of enamel is in a transiently softened, demineralised state. The acid has partially dissolved the crystal structure, and the enamel is physically softer and more abrasive than its normal, mineralised state.

Brushing while the enamel is in this softened state — particularly with a medium or hard toothbrush, or with a whitening toothpaste containing relatively coarse abrasive particles — physically removes the softened enamel. Each episode of post-acid brushing removes a thin but real layer of enamel that cannot regenerate.

The evidence-based recommendation: wait at least 30 to 60 minutes after consuming acidic food or drink before brushing. During this window, the phosphate and calcium ions present in saliva begin to remineralise the softened enamel surface, progressively restoring its hardness. Rinsing with water or consuming dairy (cheese, milk) immediately after an acidic food can accelerate this remineralisation by raising oral pH and increasing mineral availability.

If dental hygiene after a meal feels important — and it does have value, particularly in removing food debris — the practical alternative is to brush before the acidic component of a meal (before the orange juice, before the wine) or to wait the full interval afterward.

This applies particularly to patients who have fruit smoothies, fruit juice, or sparkling water as part of their daily routine. In our 10 daily habits that prevent dental problems guide, brushing timing is one of the habits discussed in detail.

4. Rinsing With Water After Brushing

Rinsing with water after brushing is so deeply ingrained in most people’s hygiene routine that it almost never occurs to anyone to question it. Parents teach children to spit and rinse. The habit feels clean, complete, comfortable. And it actively reduces the protective effect of the single most important ingredient in your toothpaste.

Fluoride is the active ingredient in standard toothpaste that prevents cavities. It works by incorporating into the enamel crystal lattice during the remineralisation process — substituting for hydroxyl ions to form fluorapatite, a harder and more acid-resistant mineral form than the native hydroxyapatite. For fluoride to have this protective effect, it needs contact time with the tooth surface. The longer fluoride remains in the oral environment after brushing, the greater the cumulative protective benefit.

Rinsing with water immediately after brushing washes away approximately 90% of the fluoride you just applied. You have neutralised most of the protective value of the toothpaste by performing what feels like the final hygienic step of the routine.

The clinical recommendation is to spit out the excess toothpaste but not to rinse. The thin layer of fluoride-containing toothpaste residue that remains on the teeth and oral mucosa after spitting is exactly what you want: it continues to deliver fluoride to the enamel surface for the next 30 to 60 minutes.

If rinsing feels non-negotiable, use a fluoride-containing mouthwash rather than plain water — and use it at a different time of day from brushing (after lunch, for example), so it provides an additional fluoride exposure rather than displacing the post-brush residue.

5. Using Whitening Strips Too Frequently

Over-the-counter whitening strips have become a mainstream cosmetic dentistry product, and when used as directed — at appropriate intervals and concentrations for appropriate patients — they can be effective and reasonably safe. The problem is that the appropriate-use guidance that comes with these products is routinely disregarded.

The bleaching agent in whitening strips — typically hydrogen peroxide or carbamide peroxide — works by oxidising the chromogenic molecules within the dentine that give teeth their colour. At appropriate concentrations and durations, this oxidation process is reversible and the structural integrity of the tooth is unaffected. At excessive concentrations or excessive frequency, the oxidation extends to the structural proteins of the dentine matrix, causing a form of damage that patients experience as acute sensitivity and that clinically manifests as mineralisation changes in the outer dentine layer.

Specific overuse consequences include:

• Tooth sensitivity: Peroxide penetrates through enamel to the dentine tubules, which communicate directly with the pulp. Excessive peroxide exposure causes reversible pulpal inflammation that produces intense thermal and tactile sensitivity. In patients with thin enamel or exposed dentine, this sensitivity can become severe.
• Gum irritation and chemical burns: Strip formulations that contact the gum margin — which is essentially unavoidable given the geometry of most mouths — can cause chemical burns to the gingival epithelium at high concentrations.
• Enamel surface changes: High-concentration or prolonged peroxide exposure causes measurable changes to enamel surface hardness and morphology under electron microscopy. Whether these changes are clinically significant long-term is debated — but they are demonstrably present.

The practical guidance: use whitening strips at the concentration and frequency specified by the product instructions — not more. Take breaks between courses. Do not use them as a daily maintenance product. If sensitivity is occurring, stop immediately and give the teeth a minimum two-week rest period. If whitening is a priority and over-the-counter products are causing sensitivity, professional whitening supervised by a dentist allows for more precise concentration and duration control.

6. Tongue Piercings

Tongue piercings cause a specific and entirely predictable pattern of dental damage that we see in patients who have had them for any significant duration. The damage is not a rare complication — it is effectively a certainty given sufficient time and contact.

The mechanisms are multiple:

Chipping and fracture of enamel: The metal barbell of a tongue piercing inevitably contacts the teeth during speech, eating, and involuntary tongue movements. Over time, this repetitive percussive contact chips the enamel, particularly from the lingual (tongue-facing) surfaces of the lower front teeth and the palatal surfaces of the upper front teeth. The corners of the lower central incisors are particularly vulnerable.

Gum recession: The barbell’s lower ball typically rests against the inside of the lower front gum. Repeated contact and micro-trauma causes the gum to recede away from the tooth, progressively exposing root surfaces that are then vulnerable to sensitivity, root caries, and further recession.

Bacterial contamination: Tongue piercings create an additional point of potential bacterial and fungal entry into the body. Peri-piercing infections, while not exclusively dental in nature, can involve the floor of the mouth and submandibular lymph nodes in ways that complicate dental management.

Nerve and salivary duct damage: Placement of a tongue piercing in a suboptimal location can damage branches of the lingual nerve or the submandibular duct, with consequences that range from temporary numbness to persistent sensory loss or altered salivary flow.

We present this information not to be prescriptive about personal choices, but because many patients with tongue piercings are entirely unaware that the damage progression is happening — it is gradual, painless, and invisible until a dentist charts it. Knowing the risk allows for a genuinely informed choice.

7. Over-Whitening With DIY Kits

This final habit is distinct from the whitening strip overuse discussed above — it refers specifically to the growing category of DIY whitening kits sold online and through non-dental channels that either contain peroxide concentrations above what is legally permitted for non-dental professional use in most jurisdictions, or use abrasive whitening mechanisms that polish away surface enamel rather than bleaching the dentine.

Unregulated products from online marketplaces — particularly those shipped from manufacturers without regulatory oversight — represent a genuine clinical risk. We have seen patients present with significant sensitivity, surface enamel changes, and in severe cases, chemical burns to the gingival tissue from misuse of such products.

The whitening principle worth understanding is this: teeth are the colour they are primarily because of the colour of the dentine beneath the enamel, not because of surface staining on the enamel. Abrasive polishing or excessive acid-based bleaching removes the outer enamel layer progressively — which does temporarily make the teeth appear whiter because you are removing the enamel and exposing the lighter interior. But enamel, once removed, is gone. You have traded permanent structural protection for a temporary cosmetic effect that also exposes the dentine, making future staining worse and sensitivity higher.

Safe whitening uses peroxide bleaching of the dentine at appropriate concentrations, does not remove enamel, and is periodically reversible in the sense that colour rebound does occur and treatment can be repeated at intervals. This is what professional whitening and properly formulated consumer products provide.

The core warning: if a whitening product is not regulated by your country’s medical device or cosmetic product regulatory framework, do not put it in your mouth.

A Final Word

None of these habits requires willpower, discipline, or significant lifestyle change to address. They require only information — the specific knowledge that what feels harmless is, in fact, causing cumulative damage. Now you have that information.

If you are concerned that any of these habits may have already caused damage you are not aware of, a clinical assessment at our routine dental checkup will provide a clear picture. And for the broader framework of habits that protect your oral health rather than undermine it, our guide to 10 daily habits that prevent dental problems is the place to start.

Understanding what sugar does to your teeth is another dimension of the same informed approach — because protecting your teeth is ultimately about replacing harmful patterns, of all kinds, with protective ones.