[Content note: This post seems to have ended up somewhere between a very long question and a very uncertain post, so I'm not sure where it belongs.]

I don't floss, and have never managed to maintain any interdental cleaning habit for more than a few weeks. Apart from enduring the standard admonitions from the dentist every six months or so, this has not yet caused me any issues. However, I'm starting to feel I should either start flossing (or using some alternative method) or decide not to, rather than just feeling vaguely guilty about it. So here I am to seek advice.

The main reason I'm not sure what I should do here is that when it comes to flossing, we seem to be in the unusual situation where the preponderance of evidence runs squarely against the very strongly stated position of basically every dentist and dental association in the world.

The dental profession seems to be unanimous in its belief that everyone should absolutely floss, and its stated reasons for believing this make intuitive sense: the bacteria that damage your teeth and gums don't care where they grow, and if you don't clean in between your teeth they'll happily accumulate there and cause progressive damage over time. Also flossing is cheap and easy and, like, teeth are really important y'all, don't take the risk.

The trouble is, the empirical support for this position just isn't there. There doesn't actually seem to be much evidence that flossing improves, well, anything really. The biggest recent story on this is this AP broadside from 2016, which claims that there is little evidence for any benefits from flossing, and what evidence there is is weak and low-quality; you can find links to the most-relevant recent studies there. But there seem to have been concerns about the evidence base for flossing going back decades, which dentists have ignored because the impact of flossing seems so obvious to them.

Last time I looked into this a few years ago I found a great post from some dental association being like "okay we admit we're really confused about the results coming out of these studies, but seriously we dentists can all tell the difference between people who floss and those who don't and the mouths of those who do look much better". I can't find it now, which makes me sad, because 100% of the rest of the response to these evidentiary concerns is dreadful. "[W]hile the effectiveness of flo

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