Wisdom teeth, not so wise after all. – Dr. Shanaz

Throughout our young adult life, most of us would definitely have some sort of tooth ache resulting from the annoying wisdom tooth. The pain usually progresses from a bearable slight pain, to annoying and pulsating pain causing mood swings and head-splitting headaches at times.

And some lucky people might not even have any problems whatsoever!

The function of wisdom teeth were meant to help us chew our food efficiently, though with the progress of technology and the bloom of the industrial and agriculture age, food nowadays are easily consumable and much softer than for our ancient cavemen ancestors. Therefore, our (human) jaws have adapted, grown slightly smaller and usually cannot accommodate the third set of molars (wisdom teeth).

Though the jaw has accommodated, the wisdom teeth still needs to grow.

This is where most of the problems start. With lack of space, the wisdom teeth do their best to erupt into our oral cavity but usually ending up impacted:

• Sometimes horizontally, causing food impaction and caries in future.
• Sometimes too outwardly, causing a lot of cheek biting
• Sometimes upright, but not quite in occlusion, causing gum to overgrow and leading to painful bites
• Sometimes slightly tilted, but also promoting a lot of food impaction

And this is when we come in, as dental surgeons, by removing the impacted wisdom teeth, or relieving the heavily keratinised soft tissue that might be preventing the full eruption of the tooth, and also restoring the teeth next to the wisdom tooth that might have developed a cavity due to the impaction.

Hopefully, the occurrence of wisdom teeth reduces as we as human evolve to our ever changing surroundings.

Feel free to comment below or email me at shanaz@story.drfauziah.com if you have any questions regarding wisdom tooth surgeries, minor oral surgeries or anything dental related too!