Last night, I was clocking my regulation 30+ seconds making tsunami victims of my teeth in the post-brushing flouride rinse. The night before, I'd polished off the green-flavored bottle, and thus started on the blue-flavored bottle (having made the color-switch for no better reason than I prefer the taste of fake peppermint to fake wintergreen.
Problem was, rinsing with the blue flavor is both an offensive and defensive proposition--i.e. strenghening the natural enamel defenses of the tooth while waging genocidal chemical warfare on its bacterial besiegers. Something I hadn't realized when I picked the blue bottle off the shelf. So to distract myself from the scorched earth this stuff was making of my tongue, I fished the empty green bottle out of the bathroom waste-basket and compared labels.
That's when Dennis came in and looked at me a bit quizically. My 30 seconds were up, so I gratefully spat out the stuff, then asked (semi-rhetorically), "What's the difference between 'Rinse' and 'Mouthwash'?"
Without missing a beat, he said, "Marketing."
Good answer. At least from the layperson's perspective. After all, the household pool of dentistry and organic chemistry knowledge is neither wide nor deep. Thus, if we go by Clarke's third law ("Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"), then perhaps it's fair to say that "Any insufficiently understood technology is indistinguishable from marketing." If true, it's sobering.
