I saw the X-ray of my own jaw and they wanted to remove my wisdom teeth and were asking if they hurt (they don’t) because they are fully sideways and apparently pressing against a nerve.
I ain’t paying for that shit. They don’t bother me. I don’t care how gnarly it looks; it’s unnecessary and expensive.
I delayed it for maybe 10 years after they first started asking if I wanted to get them removed, then finally decided it was time about a year or two ago. The recovery sucked for a couple of days, but I don’t remember my bill being exceptionally bad (I think my insurance paid quite a bit though).
Can still hear the sound of them breaking it to get it out
Ah yes how I remember them chiseling my tooth out with a hammer. The surgeon I had was a bad ass.
All four of my wisdom teeth were impacted, and it took around six hours for them to be removed. Thankfully, I was unconscious during the procedure.
Oh this was a fast one, was back in the waiting room within 15m, 10 of which was waiting for the localised pain killer to kick in before starting.
that’s me atm. luckily they’ve stopped moving and I don’t feel any pain but it’s a breeding ground of the unfunny kind
This is what gets me about the sentiment of “humans lived for hundreds of thousands of years without toothpaste/sunscreen/antibiotics/vaccines/etc and we were just fine!”
My dude, we were most definitely not fine. A lot of people died painful and preventable deaths, many of them children, and we’re around today because existing that way was just good enough to keep us going as a species.
“They were just fine!” You mean that the 40-60% of people who lived past 15 were just fine until about 50-70?
Just because people still lived a long time doesn’t mean they had a good time living.
Evolutionarily, it only matters that you reproduce.
… and that your children survive to reproduce
Otherwise we’d have no incentive to care for our kids.
I can‘t even do that. The reason: Skill issue
So that’s evolution at work.
Based
I get it, but man I can’t imagine being in the mood to reproduce while nursing an infected tooth.
Pre-anethesia, you mean. There were dentists around for a long time, but I don’t think you would’ve enjoyed being their patient…
Pre-dentistry, a bunch of your teeth would have fallen out before your wisdom teeth came in. There would have been space for the wisdom teeth so they wouldn’t need to come in sideways.
We used to have larger mouths, they’ve been shrinking as we evolved
they’ve been shrinking as we
evolvedchanged our dietNo genetic changes (evolution) happened. If as children we ate only very tough meat and lots of chewy vegetables - no bread or rice or potato softness - our same genetics would result in much larger adult jaws.
That’s right, my bad
I haven’t had my wisdom teeth extracted because my doctor said my mouth was big enough. The only real issue is brushing them so I have to clench my mouth almost shut to even reach them while brushing.
I never got all the fun drugs though.
How are we supposed to be taken seriously in glactic politics if we can’t chomp aliens in a few thousand years.
Don’t worry, humans are space orcs
Are you sure about that? We lost so many teeth after the industrialisation of sugar production (machines and slavery) but I’m not sure how bad it was before then.
Not cleaning teeth is pretty bad for teeth.
Teeth used to get cleaned by means of chewing harder food regularly, and they needed less cleaning to start with due to a lot less sugar in those foods though
So I searched it up. Food that was more abrasive, no refined carbs, more fibrous, more meat, less grain, more tannins. And ancient toothbrushes from frayed twigs, which also contained natural antimicrobials!
Thanks for prompting this educational exchange!
Also, for example in medieval times, they did clean teeth with herbs and stuff.
Ancient Babylon and Egyptians used frayed twig, according to my search!
And our teeth really went downhill after we started reproducing without the quality check provided by survival of the fittest. The remains of hunter gatherers generally have very nice teeth.
Nah.
There seems to be a genetic variation that eliminates some or all wisdom teeth. It arose in Asia so long ago that the people who populated North and South America also had it. And in most populations it is still not very prevalent (less than 50%). Despite having been around for ages.
I don’t follow the logic. Human teeth would be better if more children died? That “quality check” only applies if an organism dies before mating, which happens usually around teenage years for humans.
Maybe those hunter gatherers had better teeth because of what they ate. There seems to be too many other potential factors to simply pawn it off on Darwinism.
In a study published in the latest Nature Genetics, Cooper and his research team looked at calcified plaque on ancient teeth from 34 prehistoric human skeletons. What they found was that as our diets changed over time — shifting from meat, vegetables and nuts to carbohydrates and sugar — so too did the composition of bacteria in our mouths.
However, the researchers found that as prehistoric humans transitioned from hunting and gathering to farming, certain types of disease-causing bacteria that were particularly efficient at using carbohydrates started to win out over other types of “friendly” bacteria in human mouths. The addition of processed flour and sugar during the Industrial Revolution only made matters worse.
This reads like dentistry from the 1800s. You would’ve been a great dentist there. “I need to pull these teeth to make space for what’s to come”.
I had to get my wisdoms out before all the baby teeth came out so pre-dentistry I’d have been fucked.
If you’d been fucked (and reproduced), your shitty teeth genes would have made it into the next generation.
Me: does nothing
Evolution: fuck you
Every time people say “it’d be nice to live in the 50s” or something like that, I always think: “Nope, I’d never trade modern medicine for anything else.”
Hell, even just 30 years ago was way different. My experience of getting a root canal in 2024 was a million times better than when I had one in the ‘90s.
Science is pretty goated ngl
Watched a documentary on the history of surgery and man, modern medicine is one of the things I’m grateful for.
Medical science is one of the only reasons I’m happy to be alive now and not during other times. Everything else is absolute shit, but our ability to manage and cure disease and the like is amazing.
Of you’re not the majority ethnicity, not male, not abled, not an accepted sexuality, any time other than the present would’ve sucked much much more than today does.
Yeah, going to the doctor for a headache and seeing him pull out a drill doesn’t sound too fun.
Yeah, but either way the headache goes away pretty fast.
?
Well, either you see the drill and realize you don’t have that bad of a headache, or the trepanning works (or kills you).
Either way, the headache goes away lol
From what I have learned, apparently a lot of trepanned people didn’t die from it, suprisingly. Still, very true.
It means that humans developed empathy and the scientific means to help each other avoid natural selection. Intraspecies and interspecies empathy is the cheat code against natural selection. Certain ram species, for example, also were not designed intelligently, so as they age they may grow their horns until they penetrate their skull and kill them. Natural selection is most effective when it culls prior to the life form procreating. However, thanks to the power of empathy, we can abate natural selection by performing oral surgery on humans (ideally in our adolescence for wisdom teeth removal) and by shaving rams’ horns as they age. Ideally, as science develops and empathy spreads, we can come up with more effective and painless means to ensure everybody has a chance to live and be happy.
This ain’t evolution. This is science counterevolutionarily keeping our ancestors alive long enough to procreate who should have died. I guess it’s evolution in a way since we’ve evolved to overcome the evolutionary concept of “survival of the fittest” or natural selection.
Evolution didn’t make your teeth to grow like this. While people in the past probably had shitty teeth keep in mind that modern diets filled with sugars, processed food and all sort of junk are a cause of teeth problems
Evolution didn’t make your teeth to grow like this.
Modern diets are just selection pressure. Evolution marches on.
That’s a wisdom tooth. They just grow like that, no sugar needed (I am wrong)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_tooth
“The oldest known impacted wisdom tooth belonged to a European woman who lived between 13,000 and 11,000 BCE, in the Magdalenian period. Nonetheless, molar impaction was relatively rare prior to the modern era. With the Industrial Revolution, the affliction became ten times more common, owing to the new prevalence of soft, processed foods.”
Interesting!
