DC Child Accident & Safety Blog

That could be the modern parent's mantra, faced with the too common advice from dentists that a teenager should have healthy wisdom teeth removed "before they cause trouble."

Trouble is that the best evidence is that most wisdom teeth, impacted or not, never cause trouble to a young adult. And if and when they do, there is plenty of time to remove them when they send pain signals or show other signs of a real problem, and no downside to waiting until that day. Taking out healthy wisdom teeth causes, at a minimum, days of pain and need for heavy duty medications like Tylenol with codeine, and at a maximum, complications like loss of smell or taste.

Not to mention the considerable cost of paying oral surgeons and dentists to extract wisdom teeth.

The American Public Health Association says prophylactic removal of wisdom teeth injures tens of thousands of patients a year at a cost of billions of dollars. That's billions with a B.

Here is the APHA statement reviewing the scientific evidence on removal of wisdom teeth.

The only health group that supports removal of wisdom teeth before any pain arises is, you guessed it, the association of surgeons that do all the work: the American Association of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons.

Read more in a recent New York Times article by a thoughtful parent who ultimately concluded, after doing her own research, that "watchful waiting" was the way to go for her teen daughter.

And here are two dentists writing letters to the Times saying they agree based on their own experience that it's better to hold off and not rush into removal of wisdom teeth before you really need to.