My dentist was just discussing this with me two weeks ago, as she's a strong believer in evidence-based medicine. Except she disagreed completely with this publ

My dentist was just discussing this with me two weeks ago, as she's a strong believer in evidence-based medicine. Except she disagreed completely with this publication, citing numerous recent studies published in Great Britain. Apparently, around the year 2000, the UK's health care system introduced some new rules about managing third molars called NICE (probably to try to save some money country-wide not extracting so many wisdom teeth), and now they're learning that NICE was maybe not the greatest policy. NICE recommended that dentists do not extract wisdom teeth until their is evidence of disease, and so for the most part the dentists followed suit and stopped extracting them. Now, fifteen years later, they have found the policy has had no cost-cutting effect - extractions are at the same level as before, only now people's mouths are much less healthy. Diseased wisdom teeth often spread their bacteria on to teeth around them, in the "one bad apple spoils the bunch" way, and people often are unable to actually brush their wisdom teeth properly, especially if they're impacted. Furthermore, given that people are in general reluctant to see the dentist unless they have oral pain, they're often not discovered until the situation's already critical. When discovered, people will often have gum diseases or cavities in second molars caused by the diseased wisdom tooth nearby. See articles from the British Dental Journal such as "NICE or not so NICE?", and "The effects of NICE guidelines on the management of third molar teeth". Either way, I'm very sad I wasn't able to have my wisdom teeth removed as a child, and the anguish of spending ten years with these things wrecking my mouth was not worth it.