There’s Wisdom In Your Teeth

They’re called wisdom teeth because they usually appear later in life, typically between ages 17 and 25, when a person is considered old enough to have gained some “wisdom.”

The term goes back centuries. In fact:

• Hippocrates used a phrase meaning “teeth of late maturity.”
• In Latin, they were called dens sapientiae (tooth of wisdom).
• Many languages still use a direct translation of “wisdom tooth” today.

Of course, the irony is that when they show up, they often cause enough pain to make you feel anything but wise.

Calling them “wisdom teeth” has a sort of dry dental irony, as if the appearance of four extra molars in your late teens were a mark of sagacity, rather than a future revenue stream for someone in a white coat with a drill.

Five million Americans a year have their wisdom teeth removed, and more than half of those extractions are, according to actual science, rather than your dentist’s bill, utterly unnecessary.

A 2005 Cochrane Review, which is as close as medical research gets to the tablets from Sinai, found that 60% of these procedures could be avoided with “prudent decision-making.” That’s medical code for don’t be conned into having someone chisel perfectly good teeth out of your skull for no reason.

There are, of course, reasons to remove them, just as there are reasons to amputate a leg. If they’re growing sideways like a drunken uncle on Christmas, or rotting in place, or causing your jaw to swell up like a balloon animal, then yes, let them be gone.

But the great conveyor belt of routine “preventative” extractions has far more to do with profit than with health.

And this is not, by the way, a harmless rite of passage. Surgical removal can mean poor wound healing, infections, nerve damage that leaves your face doing a budget impression of Botox, even fractured jaws.

People have slipped into comas. People have died. And that’s before we get to the post-surgical opioid prescriptions, the dental equivalent of handing a teenager the keys to a Ferrari and a bottle of tequila. Pain, incidentally, is better managed with ibuprofen and paracetamol, but there’s no Big Ibuprofen lobby taking your dentist to Cabo.

Once upon a time, wisdom teeth were only evicted in the case of actual trouble. Our ancestors’ jaws were more generous, the result of chewing actual food, not dissolvable “meals” in cups or the sticky slop that now qualifies as “snacks.”

Dr Weston Price, the Indiana Jones of dentistry, went around the world in the early 20th century documenting indigenous people with perfect arches and enough space for every tooth nature intended. Then came the postwar dental boom, and suddenly it became standard precaution to whip out those back molars before they’d even introduced themselves.

Dr Jay Friedman, a retired dentist who still has his moral compass, calls two-thirds of wisdom tooth removals unnecessary and a public health hazard. Yet the myth persists, that these teeth are anachronistic evolutionary leftovers, lurking with malevolent intent.

Remember this: Wisdom teeth, those late-blooming squatters of the mouth, when evicted, are said by the holistic fraternity to leave behind cavitations, dark little oubliettes in the jawbone where rot and toxins conspire like a secret parliament of disease, yet most dentists dismiss them with the same contempt they reserve for astrology or vegan cheese, insisting these phantom potholes don’t exist at all, while patients whisper of fatigue and malaise cured only by drilling out the ghostly voids, making cavitations either one of medicine’s great unacknowledged scandals or simply another lucrative fairy tale with a waiting room.

And so the ritual goes on: the reclining chair, the bib, the suction tube, the pinch, the pressure, the “just a little tug” followed by a disturbing crunch.

If you take nothing else from this, take this: do not be bullied into surrendering healthy teeth. They are not plotting against you. They are not “crowding out” your mouth in a secret coup. And if your dentist gives you that look, the one that says we usually just take them out, remember that “usually” is not a clinical justification.

It’s a sales pitch with Novocaine.

From Health Ranger Mike Adams’s newsletter, as many of us are faced with the same problem.  

He writes:  

“I don’t trust dentists. I’ve long suspected dentists of scaring patients into undergoing unnecessary procedures in order to generate more business. My suspicions were confirmed when I visited a dentist in 2001 for a basic checkup. After taking dental x-rays (another health hazard, as new research is showing), my dentist fed me a scare story about how I still had all my wisdom teeth, and that all those teeth needed to be surgically removed. I was absolutely stunned. 

“My wisdom teeth were working just fine: no cavities, no pain, no problems. I had made an appointment for a routine checkup, not to undergo expensive surgery for my wisdom teeth. But my dentist insisted, relying on a variety of scare tactics to try to convince me to undergo this expensive — and completely unnecessary procedure. His behavior was highly unethical. He was using his authority and position as “the dentist” to try to scare me into accepting a surgical procedure that I quite obviously didn’t need. 

“In fact, even he couldn’t give me a good reason for justifying the surgery other than to say, “We usually remove the wisdom teeth quite early.” Which means, of course, that they just order the surgery for every child or teenager who walks into the clinic, regardless of whether they actually need it.          

“Now, it turns out, the removal of wisdom teeth has been found to be an utterly worthless procedure to begin with. It “may do more harm than good” says the British Medical Journal, after reviewing literally thousands of case studies. So the typical dentist is really just hyping a useless procedure, and if your dentist is anything like the dentist I encountered, they’re also using all sorts of highly unethical scare tactics to try to force people into undergoing the procedure. That’s downright evil, and yet it’s a common practice among dentists in the United States.”