Where does the “9/10 dentists recommend this toothpaste” claim come from?
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They do a study and ask a bunch of dentists about the toothpaste. In general, if you ask 1,000 people if they like something, it’s sort of weird if all 1,000 say “yes”. So some dentists inevitably don’t recommend it.
But if you asked 500 dentists and 468 of them decided they recommend it, that’s `468 / 500 = 0.93` or 93%. You can now legally say “9 out of 10” and that sounds better than “93 out of 100”.
Why would some dentist NOT recommend a toothpaste? Who knows. People are weird. They might have a lot of patients with sensitive teeth and only recommend those kinds of toothpaste. They might’ve been angry that day. Maybe they hate the brand. You generally can’t get a few hundred people to unanimously agree on something. But unless your toothpaste is REALLY bad, odds are if you survey enough dentists 9/10 will check a box that agrees it’s good.
There exists something called a “parity product” which are products that literally exactly the same thing, meaning the only material differences in the product from company A to company B aren’t important. For example, toothpaste is the textbook parity product, when advertisers talk about “this toothpaste” they aren’t specifically saying Crest Whitening, or Colgate Mint, they are talking about baking soda and fluoride. Pretty much all toothpastes contain those two ingredients and those are the “active” ingredients, anything else is just flavoring, coloring, or added niceties like peroxide for whitening.
As a similar example, since all parity products are the same, they are all equally “the best”, so a company that makes 10 mg pain killing pills can claim they have “the scientifically proven best pill in the market”. That’s not claiming that their pill is better than a competitor’s, it’s saying that 10 mg of this particular drug is the better than no pill at all.
So the 9/10 Dentists claim is saying that “Medical science agrees that brushing your teeth with baking soda and fluoride is recommended”, vs. not brushing at all, which is like saying doctors recommend drinking water or not breaking your legs are good ways to stay healthy.
Of course they say 9/10 because you know there is some Dr. out there who espouses some alternative belief and they want to protect against lawsuits.
Oh someone told me about that. It wasn’t about dentists and toothpaste but maybe that could apply. I’m not sure.
So, in my country, there was a medical convention, a bunch of doctors were there and there was a presentation from a pharmaceutical company about some products they just upgraded, don’t even remember what. At the end, every attendant was given a form to give their impressions. One of the questions was “Would you recommand our products to your patients ?”
He then explained to me that they used these kinds of event to make their stats.
It appears that they even send some of their products for testing to some professional in the field, I suppose toothpaste could be that kind
This came from a 70’s commercial where 4 out of 5 dentists recommended Dentyne chewing gum for fresh breath and tooth care. It was all bullshit marketing, same as you see today.
This is something that goes back a long time, as far as the 1960’s. The surveys were real. When they started running these ads in the 1970’s, they would say “Four out of five dentists…” because it was around 80%.
The other 20% recommended not chewing any gum at all. No dentist recommended regular gum.
If they are now saying 9 out of 10, that means the number recommending no gum has gone down. I gather there is new data showing that gum, if sugarless, has some benefits to one’s dental care.
My source for this is a writer in Chicago named Cecil Adams who had a regular column called “The Straight Dope”. He got these kinds of questions, researched them, and wrote the answers in a very funny way. (This is well before the internet.)
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