Whenever doctors or dentists reach a consensus about when and why a preventative health procedure should be performed, you will always find an array of people on the internet who challenge their expert opinions. Discussion and debate is always great, however, it can lead to confusion and misunderstandings among patients who then don't know what to do or who to trust. One debate you will often read about online is whether or not you should have now-healthy wisdom teeth extracted. While it can be all-too-easy to believe the naysayers who think that these teeth are fine to keep until they begin causing problems, here are just two of the several reasons dentists at clinics like Family Medical Dental Center advise patients to have them extracted before they begin causing problems.
1. They Can Cause Shifting of Your Other Teeth
Whether you had your teeth perfectly straightened with braces, have naturally great teeth, or have a smile that is a little imperfect cosmetically, no one wants their teeth to become more crooked as they grow older. Keeping even now-healthy wisdom teeth can cause other teeth to shift, and that can cause them to become crowded, jumbled, or even downright crooked. You may wonder why your "natural" wisdom teeth would cause this to happen, and the answer lies in the change in the human diet over many years.
Humans once had much broader jaws to enable the to eat the foods they hunted and gathered with very tough textures. When wisdom teeth grew in, they likely fit well into the mouths of these ancestors. Now, human jaws are much narrower due to our progression to eating a modern diet, and simply don't have room for these teeth when they grow in. Even if they emerge relatively straight, they can push on your other teeth and cause a gradual shift, similar to how braces shift teeth gradually over many months. So, just because your wisdom teeth did not yet cause your other teeth to shift, that does not mean they are not slowly and gradually putting pressure on them that will cause them to crowd.
2. They Can Cause the Adjacent Molars to Rot
If you don't care whether your teeth become crooked or not, then you hopefully do care about preventing rotting teeth. If you are planning to wait until your wisdom teeth become decayed before having them removed, then you may end up also having to have your second molars (the molars right in front of your wisdom teeth) removed, as well, or at least having extensive and costly dental work performed on them.
Why? Decay can pass from tooth to tooth, and once your wisdom teeth become noticeably bad, your second molars will likely also have some decay, too. These teeth often sit closely together, causing not only decay to pass from one to the other, but also causing difficulty cleaning between them that can even lead to gum infections. So, once you have your decayed wisdom teeth removed, you may realize the back side of your second molar that is then revealed has decayed and then needs costly repairs or even extraction that could have been avoided.
While some proponents of keeping your wisdom teeth may state that they are fine to keep since they are a "natural" part of your body, the truth is that as the mouths of humans changed, these molars are now obsolete. Even worse, they can be detrimental to your other teeth, even if they look healthy now. Having them extracted before they cause problems can save you extensive (and expensive) dental work later.
Share31 December 2015
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