Yeah, but when he gets with a girl, she might pull one of these... And then she'll say that she's just not ready to be in a relationship...and the "its not you, its me" line.
I'm almost 30, and have all 4 of my wisdom teeth in place. The lower right one is only halfway up though, and has been for a long time. The upper right row of teeth have been pushed together, so my middle tooth is is more inward to my mouth. The tightness has shifted them over the years. I've only been to the dentist twice as a kid, maybe 12 years old being the last time. No cavities that I know of. I need to go get the coffee stains out and get checked out. My feeling on wisdom teeth is that people used to lose their teeth more often than they do now, so by the time the wisdom teeth were coming in, there was likely some room in your mouth. Our teeth last us longer today.
I hear dentists don't like to pull wisdom teeth out of blacks because they don't tip well. Seriously though I've had one taken out because it got cracked and that was when I was 35 and haven't had any problems since. I think the other ones are in and remember having some teeth pain when I was in my early 20's but they haven't bothered me since. The one that I got pulled was a pretty easy procedure and the dentist said because it was a top one that those are far easier to pull than the lower ones.
Interesting, usually the top ones are more difficult because you have 3 roots on the uppers while only 2 roots on the lowers. The 3 roots can all be pointing in different directions, making extraction much more complicated than just grabbing the forceps and twisting it out of the socket. Usually, you have to do some sort of dissection with one of the roots, pull out the tooth, then go back in and extract the remaining root structure. So you only have a lower 3rd on that side and nothing opposing it when you bite?
My lower ones were coming in crooked, so they were cut out when I was young. My uppers are in, but they are odd shaped: they have a point that hangs down lower than the rest of my molars and they're notched in the back. There's probably some truth to the "need the lowers to be shaped right" story.
The way the dentist described it was that there was a special tool designed for pulling out the top teeth. Perhaps he might've just been more adept at pulling top teeth but all I know is not counting the prep time it only took about a 30 seconds for the actual procedure. I do have a 3rd molar on the other side with nothing above it but there doesn't seem to be any problems with it.
DECKARD- You might want to get your son circumcised anyways. There was a study done in Africa about HIV infection in heterosexual man and circumcision and they called the study off because they found a huge correlation between HIV infection and (un)circumcision. Basically the part of the skin that is left on is very susceptible to the HIV virus or something. "The announcement was made by officials of the National Institutes of Health as they halted two clinical trials, in Kenya and Uganda, on the ground that not offering circumcision to all the men taking part would be unethical. The success of the trials confirmed a study done last year in South Africa." http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/14/health/14hiv.html?ex=1184040000&en=35e0a64537dd7928&ei=5070 Not saying your son is a player or anything but teenagers (especially boys) often think with something that is not their brain.
^ I heard about that study and am wondering about the causal relationship between the two. Could being uncircumsized in Third World Countries with low sanitary conditions mean lead to having infections under the foreskin and someone in a place with better sanitary conditions be OK being uncircumsized as long as they stay clean?
