The harms of wisdom tooth removal and how to avoid it

1. Introduction

This text comes from my own personal experience having had two wisdom teeth removed and from research I made on the subject. I mean to explain my theory why there are issues with wisdom tooth removal that are unknown right now and review ways to avoid removal.

2. Neighbors of the wisdom teeth and the wisdom teeth's importance

The wisdom tooth touches the buccintor muscle, buccal fat pad and masseter muscle.
(Pronunciation: masseter like mass-e-ter or mas-ee-ter, buccal as buckle, a belt fastener, and buccinator as buc-ci-nai-tr.)
The masseter muscle is a muscle at the side of the jaw. The buccal fat pad is mass of fat partly located in the back of the cheeks that is encapsulated with a hard membrane. The buccinator muscle is a muscle on the inside of the cheeks that passes near all the three molar teeth.

The following is a picture showing the outline of the masseter muscle on a skull:

Masseter muscle and wisdom teeth locations in head
The masseter muscle is outlined. The wisdom teeth are the teeth inside the outline.
(Annotation added to picture of skull from Pennsylvania State University's Pinterest account: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/human-skull-side-view--494762709034299664/. Used under fair use law.)

In the following two pictures you can see a replica of a human skull with (vegan) model clay showing the parts neighboring the wisdom teeth:

Skull side view
Buccinator muscle (green), buccal fat pad (yellow) and masseter muscle (red).
Skull front view
Buccinator muscle (green), buccal fat pad (yellow) and masseter muscle (red).

You can see the masseter muscle (in red in the skull model above) and the buccal fat pad (the yellow in the model above) as they create a bulge in the buccinator muscle (green above) when looking inside of a cheek.
Here's a picture of a mouth with the bulge marked in it:

The borders of the bulge are marked with three yellow lines. The wisdom tooth here was extracted.

Here is a second picture inside the mouth, this time with the lower wisdom teeth still there, showing the bulge created by the masseter muscle and buccal fat pad touching them.

The right wisdom tooth and bulge (made by the masseter muscle and buccal fat pad) are marked. The corresponding left side structures can also be seen on the other side.
(Picture edited from one by user Parietal Cell on Quora.com. Link: https://qr.ae/pKhsEK. Used under fair use law.)

By looking in all the pictures above you can see how the wisdom teeth touch the bulge created in the inside of the cheek by the masseter muscle and the buccal fat pad through the buccinator muscle. When the lower jaw moves to the side, the lower wisdom tooth would press even more into these three, because they would move diagonally, being stationary in their top parts but having their bottom parts moving with the lower jaw to the side. That is, when the lower jaw moves to the side the wisdom tooth presses into the bulge. Here's an illustration of this:

Green is lower wisdom tooth, grey is lower jaw (below) and cheekbone (above) and red is masseter muscle. See how the wisdom tooth presses into the masseter muscle when the lower jaw is moved to the side.

So, the wisdom tooth touches the masseter muscle, buccal fat pad and buccinator muscle. When the lower jaw moves to the side, the lower wisdom tooth would press even more into these three, and this would affect the movement of the lower jaw, especially to the side. (The upper wisdom teeth have similar interactions.) Removal of wisdom teeth therefore would alter, negatively though subtly, speech, appearance and even the way one feels and thinks.

3. The preventive removal of impacted wisdom teeth

The removal of wisdom teeth because they are impacted (not fully erupted), without them actually having any problems, is a somewhat common practise, however, they should not be removed unless they have an actual problem and it can't be fixed, according to this scientific publication: The Prophylactic Extraction of Third Molars: A Public Health Hazard (prophylactic means preventive) and the UK's National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE): Guidelines for wisdom teeth removal. Note: It is advisable, in my opinion, to go regularly to a dentist for checkups, perhaps once every six months or year, to monitor the teeth in general, especially if you have impacted wisdom teeth, and fix problems before they become serious.

4. The removal of wisdom teeth for orthodontic treatment

Sometimes wisdom teeth are removed for orthodontic treatment, under the belief that they would crowd the other teeth and make them crooked. However, research suggests this is actually untrue. In this scientific paper (The Prophylactic Extraction of Third Molars: A Public Health Hazard, Jay W. Friedman, in section "Myth Number 3 - Pressure of Erupting Third Molars Causes Crowding of Anterior Teeth") the author writes that studies have proved that wisdom teeth do not cause crowding of the other teeth, and that wisdom teeth's eruption doesn't have enough force to move the other teeth. Therefore, removing wisdom teeth for orthodontic treatment is needless and a mistake.

5. How to avoid wisdom tooth removal

Avoidance of wisdom tooth removal is possible by the following:

6. Appendixes

A. How soft food causes impacted wisdom teeth

Crooked teeth and impacted wisdom teeth are preventable. They are caused by the jaw being too small to accommodate the teeth. And the jaw doesn't grow large enough because of not chewing enough hard foods in childhood, while the bones are still growing, as the mechanical stress of chewing them stimulates the growth of the jaw. I believe eating fresh and whole fruits and vegetables should give the needed resistance.

More information about this can be found here:

B. List of poeple who had wisdom teeth removal

Press here for a list of about a hundred celebrities who had wisdom tooth removal, with information about how many wisdom teeth they removed and a note if they started having any problems after the removal.

I have also made a list of 50 celebrities I chose at random from online lists of famous people and wrote if they have had any problematic behavior associated with them. This list is here. I then compared this list with the previous one, and the percentage of people with issues in the wisdom tooth removed list is 50% and in the randomly chosen list is 32%.

7. About me

My name is Asaf Cygelberg (The first A in Asaf is pronounced like A-saf and not Ay-saf and Cy is pronounced like the Z in Mozart with an /I/ vowel after it), I was born in 1984 and I live in Tel Aviv, Israel. I studied in the Adi Lautman Interdisciplinary Program for Outstanding Students at Tel Aviv University, completing about 85% of a combined BSc in Physics and Mathematics as well as taking courses in Biology and the Humanities. I have been published in a scientific journal for work I had done on mathematics in biology (the use of graph theory in epidemiology). I have been researching the effects of wisdom tooth removal on my own on and off since 2012, and had wisdom tooth removal myself, one in 2008 and one in 2015. If you have any questions about wisdom teeth, comments about the website or are a researcher interested in collaborating about the wisdom teeth theory I showed here, please write to me at 1wasasalted@gmail.com.