This little cunt of mine tended to inflame every other month instead of teething already. I decided to remove it, and I ended up spending almost 2 hours in surgery because it had fused into another tooth. Instead of coming out cleanly, it broke and a few fragments were left behind
Doc said it was okay to leave it as it would be absorbed or come out again eventually. Almost a year later, and the little prick sends his regards by inflaming my face completely and having to rush to surgery again.
For anybody who thinks that animals in their natural environment are all happy...yeah imagine living for decades without any sort of dental care. Evolution is about surviving, not thriving.
It's odd to me that anyone fantasizes about nature in general being peaceful. Especially when the plot of most nature documentaries can be summarized as "fall in love with this creature, then experience the stress of watching it struggle desperately to survive."
Human mandible shrank a bit the last millenia, probably thanks to the rise of agricolture and easily chewable food, but that left less space for teeth to grow properly
I think a lot of folks assume that evolution means "all the crappy stuff whittled out over time, and only the good stuff remains" when in fact I think evolution aims for "eh, they reproduced. Good enough"
I guess I should buy a lottery ticket, then, because my wisdom teeth came in pretty much straight. The only problem I ever have is getting anything back there for cleaning.
Yea I got dry sockets after, even after being really careful. It was a nightmare. I remember lying on the floor on the carpet drooling trying to eat mac n cheese.
Well, see, your mistake is brushing your teeth and living past 30. If your back molars were properly rotten enough to gracefully pop out when the wisdoms grew in, and then you died before that one rotted and you couldn't chew anymore, you wouldn't have any problems.
Not all. Pre industrial humans where I live ate a lot of slow roasted cactus. After 2 days buried with hot stones the cactus hearts were caramelized. I've tasted it prepared in the traditional manner and it's just syrup in a leaf. Delicious, and I have no doubt it was great energy for people that had to walk miles every day.
Anyone that lived past 30 had their teeth rot right out of their head, according to the archiological record.
Depends on where they were and what they were eating. Humans are really amazing in that we can eat almost anything that's not a straight up tree, and we've existed across the planet in just about every ecological niche. I remember reading somewhere they could estimate the age of desert burial/skeleton remains on how worn the teeth are due to the sand getting in the food. But I'm sure no processed sugar is pretty beneficial tho
Pre-dentistry, a bunch of your teeth would have fallen out before your wisdom teeth came in. There would have been space for the wisdom teeth so they wouldn't need to come in sideways.
they’ve been shrinking as we evolvedchanged our diet
No genetic changes (evolution) happened. If as children we ate only very tough meat and lots of chewy vegetables - no bread or rice or potato softness - our same genetics would result in much larger adult jaws.
I haven’t had my wisdom teeth extracted because my doctor said my mouth was big enough. The only real issue is brushing them so I have to clench my mouth almost shut to even reach them while brushing.
Are you sure about that? We lost so many teeth after the industrialisation of sugar production (machines and slavery) but I'm not sure how bad it was before then.
And our teeth really went downhill after we started reproducing without the quality check provided by survival of the fittest. The remains of hunter gatherers generally have very nice teeth.
This is what gets me about the sentiment of "humans lived for hundreds of thousands of years without toothpaste/sunscreen/antibiotics/vaccines/etc and we were just fine!"
My dude, we were most definitely not fine. A lot of people died painful and preventable deaths, many of them children, and we're around today because existing that way was just good enough to keep us going as a species.
I remember they were really worried that I wasn't waking up from my surgery that was scheduled from 7am to 8am. They also scolded my dad for coming in and telling "c'mon get up it's time to go" until they saw me finally getting up and groaning about it being too early. You'd think it was their first experience with a teenager...
Depends. I had 4 at 90°. Only one hurt a little. They caused pockets, which are hard to clean (impossible by yourself) and can accelerate bone loss. I removed 3 of them. 2 by a jaw surgeon. They were creating a space bewteen molars deeper inside the bone, while also creating an opening at the top. Nasty.
Chronic inflamation of the gums don't hurt either. Best way to tell is by a mouth hygiënist. If your gums bleed easily while flossing, it's a good idea to keep flossing. Takes about 1-2 weeks before the gums calm down and the swelling dissipates. I use those tiny round brushes to get in between. If you start using those, m start with the thinnest wire. The metal should absolutely not scrape against the teeth, only the brush.
Dude, more. 200% more as my wife and I sit her and suffer tonight. She’s getting it dealt with next month, mine rotting out while I wait to even get a luxury bone appointment.
I saw the X-ray of my own jaw and they wanted to remove my wisdom teeth and were asking if they hurt (they don't) because they are fully sideways and apparently pressing against a nerve.
I ain't paying for that shit. They don't bother me. I don't care how gnarly it looks; it's unnecessary and expensive.
My wife did the same as you. Ten years later her wisdom teeth, in the process of trying to get out, broke one of her other teeth so she had to not only remove them but restore her once healthy tooth. Much more expensive (and painful) this way.
They can actually seriously fuck up your mouth very quickly, and you often won't find out until the fuckery is underway. I had two removed when the dentist told me they might cause future problems, I had no pain, but now they're out I can actually feel my teeth kinda relaxing? I guess the pressure was there but I just got used to it.
I delayed it for maybe 10 years after they first started asking if I wanted to get them removed, then finally decided it was time about a year or two ago. The recovery sucked for a couple of days, but I don't remember my bill being exceptionally bad (I think my insurance paid quite a bit though).
I only have the free insurance from the state and while the health insurance is excellent and covers every single thing I can think of, the dental side sucks major balls. Getting wisdom teeth removed is considered cosmetic (by the insurance provider), so they won't cover it at all, and pretty much any good dentist is expensive as fuck for anything but a cleaning or cavity fill without insurance.
It means that humans developed empathy and the scientific means to help each other avoid natural selection. Intraspecies and interspecies empathy is the cheat code against natural selection. Certain ram species, for example, also were not designed intelligently, so as they age they may grow their horns until they penetrate their skull and kill them. Natural selection is most effective when it culls prior to the life form procreating. However, thanks to the power of empathy, we can abate natural selection by performing oral surgery on humans (ideally in our adolescence for wisdom teeth removal) and by shaving rams’ horns as they age. Ideally, as science develops and empathy spreads, we can come up with more effective and painless means to ensure everybody has a chance to live and be happy.
Every time people say "it'd be nice to live in the 50s" or something like that, I always think: "Nope, I'd never trade modern medicine for anything else."
Hell, even just 30 years ago was way different. My experience of getting a root canal in 2024 was a million times better than when I had one in the ‘90s.
Dude medical science is progressing at a rate where I might genuinely be able to cheer science on to outpace my natural aging for certain age-related procedures and ailments that commonly afflict people late in life
Medical science is one of the only reasons I'm happy to be alive now and not during other times. Everything else is absolute shit, but our ability to manage and cure disease and the like is amazing.
Of you're not the majority ethnicity, not male, not abled, not an accepted sexuality, any time other than the present would've sucked much much more than today does.
This ain't evolution. This is science counterevolutionarily keeping our ancestors alive long enough to procreate who should have died. I guess it's evolution in a way since we've evolved to overcome the evolutionary concept of "survival of the fittest" or natural selection.
Evolution didn't make your teeth to grow like this. While people in the past probably had shitty teeth keep in mind that modern diets filled with sugars, processed food and all sort of junk are a cause of teeth problems
"The oldest known impacted wisdom tooth belonged to a European woman who lived between 13,000 and 11,000 BCE, in the Magdalenian period. Nonetheless, molar impaction was relatively rare prior to the modern era. With the Industrial Revolution, the affliction became ten times more common, owing to the new prevalence of soft, processed foods."