If you haven't had your teeth cleaned in a long time or have had a lot of problems with your teeth, you may have to get a procedure called scaling and root planing, which involves cleaning the root surfaces of your teeth, which is more expensive than a routine visit.
The key background to this question is the nature of sound waves and light waves. Youâre right in that sound waves are a vibration traveling through an object, including condensed things like solids and liquids. In solids, those waves can consist of either alternating compressed and stretched regions, or regions wiggling sideways, compared to the direction the wave is traveling.
Sound waves are known as longitudinal because the medium in which they travel â air, water or whatever else â vibrates in the same direction as the wave itself. Loudspeakers, for example, move air molecules back and forth in the same direction as the vibration of the speaker cone. In both cases, the water or air molecules remain, largely, in the same place as they started, as the wave travels through the material. They are not shifted, en masse, in the direction of the wave.