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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

When I was 21, my dentist wanted to remove my wisdom teeth. I asked him why, he said "because wisdom teeth are difficult to clean and you'll likely lose them by age 30 anyway because of that." I replied that since they were healthy now, I'd wait and see, and got a new dentist.

I'm 56 now and my wisdom teeth are still there and still healthy.

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I had mine well into my late 30's but I could not brush behind them as they where so close to my jaw. I have very strong teeth but eventually age caught up with them. Funny part was I would occasionally suffer from headaches but they where so infrequent that I just assumed they where normal headaches. Years later, after having them removed I realized that I had not had a headache in years.

I had to have mine removed at 17 for orthodontic purposes. I used to pride myself on never having headaches like my peers, but after having my wisdom teeth removed I've been having headaches every few weeks for the last decade. Have no clue what happened but I'm assuming that the contact released tension in my jaw, after removal my teeth no longer have any contact in the relaxed state.

I agree. I think it's fine to wait till you're getting issues from your wisdom teeth before thinking about removing it. If it costs nothing to delay a major surgery by a day, you should do it.

Most of the time it's not major surgery, in those cases I would just get on with it.

Isn't that the point though? I had 2 of mine removed at 19.. A jab of local anasthetic, some tugging with some pliers (I'm sure the dentist might call them something else) and 20 mins later I was sitting in a lecture at university.

That certainly wasn't major surgery.

Unfortunately, iff you do have a problem though, it gets worse the longer you wait.

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