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Wisdom Teeth

By Eloise Graham

Why are these back molars called wisdom teeth? Do we get wiser when they come in? Do we become dumb when they are pulled?

A recent visit to the dentist, then the oral surgeon, had me pondering some of these  questions as well as remembering my many hours spent in the dentist’s chair.

Let’s start with the “baby teeth.” These little biters start emerging in the first few months after birth. In rare cases, some babies have been born with a tooth already exposed. But normally the teeth come in starting around six months. By around age three all 20 teeth have cut through. That’s right, children have only 20 teeth while adults have 32.

According to a time line chart that I googled, children lose their baby teeth between ages eight through twelve.

Eloise at 5 years old

I wasn’t on that chart! Oh the memories of the dentist chair when I was only six. My big girl teeth were already coming in – as huge buck teeth. I had braces. The bases for the bands were around my first molars. For five years I had braces. When they were finally removed, I had decay in the four molars that had had the metal sleeves around them to anchor the bands. I had my first fillings. By that time the second molars had arrived and I had 28 nice, straight teeth. But lo and behold, at age 14 my wisdom teeth started to break through and crowded my straightened teeth. Those impacted babies were extracted.

Most of us have had our wisdom teeth extracted. Wisdom teeth usually come in between ages 17 and 25, however some adults don’t get them until they are in their 30s or 40s. So why do we have these things if they are usually pulled at the time of emergence? Historians say that our diets and eating habits have changed over the centuries. Our ancestors had tougher meat and coarser vegetable meals than we have today. Hence the need for more molars to chomp on the food. As the need for the third set of molars became less, the size of the jawbone decreased.

But why the name wisdom teeth? They don’t really make us any wiser. It’s because they usually don’t emerge until our teen years or later, so we should be wiser than we were when the other molars came in.