[hannob]

In Germany pretty much every dentist will recommend you a "profesionelle Zahnreinigung" (professional tooth cleaning), and if you lookup what studies exist to show that it does any good, there's only one study that's basically useless (they tested a combination of the professional tooth cleaning and a lecture on proper self tooth cleaning and showed that this helps, so in the end you know one of those or a combination helps, but you don't know which one). So yeah, this is pretty much a problem in Europe, too.

[Semaphor]

I drink a lot of coffee and black tea. I very much value the half-yearly cleaning just to remove the dark spots that are not a health-risk, but look bad.

And almost every private tooth health insurance covers those anyway, so if you have that for others reasons, it’s included.

[stefan_]

The tooth cleaning is much the same as what happens on the yearly cleaning your insurance pays for (and highly recommends you do). Is that one also "basically useless"? How much study does one need to judge if mechanical dental tartar removal is beneficial?