[fbdab103]

This conflicts with some advice I have previously heard, so would be interested in any hard research for or against.

I was told that if you vomit, you should not brush or rinse your mouth. You are only moving the low pH stomach acid around your mouth and exposing more teeth to the acidic environment. Instead you should try to neutralize the acid (baking powder or similar).

On one hand, I could believe you are just spreading the damage around. On the other, it feels hard to believe that some residual ~2 pH stomach acid would remain when massively diluted by a mouthful of ~7 pH tap water.

[rcoveson]

That doesn't sound like a conflict to me. People actively resist allowing vomit to touch most of their mouth. We tend to do the opposite with soda. So swishing with water after vomiting puts vomit where it otherwise wouldn't have been, while swishing with water after drinking soda only dilutes the places that soda already was.

The brushing thing has to do with the effect acid has on enamel.

I doubt you could find a dentist that wouldn't recommend swishing with water after drinking soda.

[fbdab103]

Perhaps I am an explosive vomit-er, but mid-act, I have little concern to what area of my mouth is being exposed. I would consider my entire mouth to be vomit coated. Whereas soda would be mostly concentrated to the bottom fraction of my mouth, predominantly on my tongue.

Acidic vomit or acidic soda seem like roughly the same thing. Either it should be diluted and swished or not.