it's hard for me to know how much difference the fluoride is making, but i've noticed the stains fall into a pattern of very slow retreat. and, yes - i am convinced it's 100% staining and 0% cavitation, which doesn't get me out of the woods - it suggests my gums are in pretty bad shape. i put off the call to the fancy dentist until i could develop some further stability, and will need to wait a little longer, i think.
while i think the surfactants in the dish soap are eating away it at very slowly sort of thing, the most noticeable changes actually seem to be associated with the hydroxyapatite, but only when i do it right, which is proving a little more challenging than i thought. i need to use a very small amount of saliva and leave it on my teeth for something like 40 minutes. there have been a couple of times where this has noticeably helped, and a lot of times where it hasn't. i don't know if i'm actually rebuilding something there, or what.
there were a couple of teeth that were splitting open up that i've managed to reattach to themselves, at least for now. that was a part of the reason i want to call the fancy dentist to do the "root planing" thing, which cleans out developing pockets in an attempt to allow the teeth to heal themselves. this is partly why it was important for me to know what i was looking at - stains on a bad gumline (and that could be caused by smoking, by coffee, by dehydration, by malnutrition, by genetics or, more likely, by some combination of these things) or teeth falling apart due to cavities. the fact that they're reattaching suggests that giving the teeth proper surface nutrition is at least helping, whether that implies malnutrition or not.
so, it's two months and i'm going to characterize the progress as moderate and keep with it.
i'm going to want to cut the dish soap out at some point, though.