Most Americans hear it by the time they hit their late teens or early twenties: “Your wisdom teeth need to come out.” The reasons given for it can sound perfectly reasonable:
- The teeth will be easier to extract now, while you’re young.
- They might cause crowding.
- They make it harder to clean, so you’ll be more likely to get cavities or gum disease.
- They might cause problems later, so we might as well get rid of them now.
In most areas of medicine, though, we don’t remove healthy organs “just in case” they might cause problems later. Only in conventional dentistry.
It’s not that the human jaw isn’t able to hold 32 teeth. Fully developed jaws certainly can. Unfortunately, aspects of modern life have contributed to smaller jaws. Without breastfeeding, for instance, a child misses the natural palate-widening movements that nursing provides. The soft, ultra-processed foods that dominate the modern diet means les chewing and thus less of the stimulation needed for good jaw growth.
When jaws are underdeveloped, there may not be enough room for the wisdom teeth to come in. They can’t erupt into their proper positions. They become impacted.
Impacted wisdom teeth can be painful. They can damage adjacent teeth. They can cause crowding and misalignment. Infections can develop around them. These are third molars that should be removed. (“Third molar” is another name for a wisdom tooth.)
But not all wisdom teeth will cause problems. Many people keep them for a lifetime without any complications. Some people never develop wisdom teeth at all.
As ever, the key is to assess each person’s situation individually rather than recommending the same course of treatment for every single patient. As a biological practice, we take an inherently conservative approach, monitoring wisdom teeth over time,supporting their proper eruption as much as possible, and extracting only when this approach fails or clear problems develop.
And when that happens, we focus not only on the surgery but supporting the complex healing process that follows.
In extracting a tooth, we make sure to remove not only the entire tooth but the periodontal ligament that connects it to the supporting bone. Conventional extractions often leave bits of this ligament behind along with infected bone tissue, creating an environment that can’t heal properly. This incomplete healing can lead to a condition called osteonecrosis of the jaw, or what patients typically call “cavitations,” which are marked by areas of dead or diseased tissue within the jawbone.
These sites can become ongoing sources of toxin production that can affect your whole body via your bloodstream. This can contribute to chronic inflammatory conditions, immune system dysfunction, and a variety of health issues that may seem to have nothing to do with your mouth.
The development of such sites is extremely common after third molar removal. As the title of a paper by Drs. Hal Huggins and Thomas Levy put it, “Routine Dental Extractions Routinely Produce Cavitations.” Their study found osteonecrotic lesions at nearly 90% of all third molar extraction sites.
To prevent these, we also make sure to thoroughly clean the bone and treat the area with ozone, a powerful natural disinfectant that also stimulates healing. We also use platelet rich fibrin (PRF) to accelerate new tissue growth and improve blood flow while reducing inflammation and discomfort.
Our enhanced healing protocols do take more time and attention than standard surgery, but when wisdom tooth extraction IS called for, they can make the difference between good healing and long term oral/systemic complications.
