Four wisdoms you don’t need

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Eveything’s great. You are confident that all your cavities have been filled and what you are visiting your dentist for is just your regular semi-annual prophylactic cleaning.

Oops... Your dentist notices something. You’ve got too much wisdom in your mouth!

What’s wrong with that? Wisdom is a good thing, isn’t it? I want all the wisdom I can get. That, and vintage jewelry!

Surprise, surprise! Sometimes, too much of everything can be bad for you. A good example is your wisdom teeth.

We have molars at the backmost area of our mouth, and these wisdom teeth are the third and last of these molars to come out. Every individual is a different case, and your dentist may have a different reason to want to remove, or perhaps maintain, the wisdom teeth in your mouth.

When wisdom teeth are removed due to infection, that’s called interceptive treatment. When nothing seems to be the problem but they have to be removed anyway, that’s a prophylactic treatment. Prophylaxis means preventive.

What are we preventing? Infection, a cavity on the wisdom tooth or even the neighboring tooth (the one which we use to chew steak on), crowding, cysts and tumors.

Gums attach to teeth where the root starts. Because of this, if even just a tip of your wisdom tooth emerges in your mouth, a space is created around the tooth that can act as a reservoir of bacteria. This may cause the painful, bad-tasting, smelly and repetitive infection that dentists want to spare you from.

If the bacteria buildup doesn’t bother your gums through infection, it may otherwise take a toll on your teeth by developing a cavity on your wisdom tooth or, more dangerously, on the innocent, good-for-chewing-yummy-food molar just in front of it.

That pool of bacteria lies at the back where even your dentist can’t get to, so it’s a very good place for cavities to incubate. The better option in this case is still extraction.

So why now and not postpone the extraction until the tooth is decaying? Because a decayed tooth gives the dentist less leverage. The easier it is for the dentist to perform the extraction, the easier it is on the patient, too.

We don’t need our wisdom teeth! The first and second molars, and even our premolars, are enough for us to enjoy our meals.

Some patients are lucky to not grow wisdom teeth. I say they are highly evolved people. Some studies suggest that with wisdom teeth trying to emerge in a mouth already full of teeth, they may cause crowding. This theory is not widely accepted. But teeth do move and are greatly affected by the balance of teeth that exist in the mouth.

Crowding may be due to the size of your teeth (being too big, for instance) or the number of teeth (too many), compared to the size of your jaw. Notice that primitive men had longer jaws and more teeth.

Generally, when a tooth is “stuck” or cannot emerge into position, it is a potential source of problems. Though not very common, cysts and tumors can develop from such stunted growths. So that’s why it’s not very wise to keep those four wisdom teeth in your mouth.