[hcrisp]

I asked mine, and he said the wisdom teeth can crowd teeth if the jaw size is too small causing buckling (a cosmetic issue). More seriously, it can interfere with nerves in your jaw (again because of size constraints) causing numbness / paralysis, etc. Likely the decision to remove them comes down to your genetic / jaw structure and whether they have fully come in yet or not.

https://www.webmd.com/oral-health/wisdom-teeth-removal-neces...

[sidewndr46]

The other thing that can interfere with the nerves in your jaw is having them extracted. One of my family members has no feeling there because the extraction was bungled years ago.

[bsimpson]

I had mine done in college. I really didn't want to do it.

I would have been totally happy to buck the pressure of "this is what everyone does," but the thing that made me reluctantly agree to it was an explanation that if I didn't, they would bore holes into my then-back teeth as they grew in and I'd have a big problem to deal with.

As I understood it, teeth normally grow straight up, but wisdom teeth grow sideways (with the tops facing the front of your mouth). The wisdom teeth then hit the rest of your teeth and basically bulldoze your mouth.

I have no idea how true/bullshit that is, but it's what I was told to get me to finally acquiesce to the procedure.

[zerocrates]

Definitely not all wisdom teeth come in like that: it's possible to have all 4 aligned normally and have have enough room (I do).

But coming in towards other teeth and hitting them, or other forms of impaction, are pretty common. You probably saw (or could have seen) the situation pretty clearly on an x-ray.

That being said, there is/was definitely an air of "this is just what we do, it's easier this way" for removing wisdom teeth, akin to say, what removing tonsils once was.

[bigstrat2003]

My wisdom teeth came in like you describe. They meet my back molars at a 90 degree angle. They never bothered me, though - I have had two removed because they got infected, but otherwise they never caused any issues.

[thyristan]

It can be true for some people. Look at the lower right one on the xray here: https://www.jwz.org/gruntle/wisdom-teeth.html

[bsimpson]

Unless you wanna see an adviceanimals take on a hairy ballsack, you've gotta open that incognito.

I don't think Jamie wants HN traffic on his blog.

[mlyle]

You just copy and paste the url, so that the referrer is unset.

[thyristan]

Ah, that explains the downvotes. Sorry. My browser just doesn't send a referrer for clicked links, so I didn't notice.