And floss too. If it’s the evening, that’s a perfect time to do it. If it’s the morning, great time as well. Middle of the day? You’ve probably had food, brush them teeth. If you’ve recently (but not immediately after, wait a bit, drink some water) eaten, that’s a perfect time to brush. Especially if you’ve recently had something sugary (avoid sugary stuff, also like I said not too recently).
And if you can, and haven’t recently, see a dentist.
Your teeth are precious, and hard to replace. Lack of proper dental care can in many ways amount to a tax on the poor, where a lack of proper preventative care can turn mouths into an unaffordably fixable mess. Get people in your community to take care of their teeth too.
There’s really only a few situations where you shouldn’t be brushing your teeth right now: you vomited recently (brushing after vomiting can degrade the protective coating on your teeth), or you brushed recently.
Not having the equipment for it on you is only an excuse this once, carrying that stuff with you is a good idea. You eat and drink throughout the day, so you should brush and floss throughout the day. And who knows when you’ll need to be presentable? You don’t want to barrage your comrades, friends, partners, or “path to promotion” (your bosses) with bad breath.
Dentists are almost all scammers and are less trustworthy than a used car salesman nursing a particularly vicious coke habit. Yeah I go to the dentist like everybody else but holy fuck the number of times different offices have tried to run scams on me is beyond any other profession including oil change places. If you go to a new dentist and they recommend you like five different procedures totaling thousands of dollars they are almost certainly a scammer. Unfortunately you can’t trust reviews, different dentists at the exact same office can have totally different levels of honesty.
Yeah, finding a good dentist is really important. The “family friend (or similar) that you personally know from things unrelated to dentistry” strat has worked pretty well for me. “Small town in a big city” type of thing, I guess. Often I connect with dental medical professionals (orthodontic, dentist, etc,) over academic pursuits. Lots of them are quite smart, and like to exercise it. That strategy doesn’t always work well with other medical fields, and personally knowing dentists can be hard (it’s not like there’s a huge number of them).
It reminds me of the situation with therapists, a lot. Quality can vary wildly, cost can vary wildly, and peoples experiences often do not line up, even with the same person.
It’s not like therapists or dentists are inherently bad, it’s just a situation that can easily turn predatory (especially considering, like I said, how struggles with prevention in poorer communities lead to great cost later on).