New Age Gathering

Your dentist is full of bunk: surgery to remove wisdom teeth is worthless, says


Your dentist is full of bunk: surgery to remove wisdom teeth is worthless, says British Medical Journal

Surgery to remove wisdom teeth is worthless, says British Medical Journal
(Partially reprinted from www.NewsTarget.com/001108.html)

In a groundbreaking report from the British Medical Journal, researchers who poured over thousands of studies detailing the efficacy of medical and dental procedures have concluded that many popular surgical procedures are completely worthless. Among those is one of the most common procedures performed by your dentist: the removal of so-called "impacted" wisdom teeth. According to the BMJ, this procedure may actually do more harm than good.

I don't trust dentists. I've long suspected dentists of scaring patients into undergoing unnecessary procedures in order to generate more business. My suspicions were confirmed when I visited a dentist in 2001 for a basic checkup. After taking dental x-rays (another health hazard, as new research is showing), my dentist fed me a scare story about how I still had all my wisdom teeth, and that all those teeth needed to be surgically removed. I was absolutely stunned.

My wisdom teeth were working just fine: no cavities, no pain, no problems. I had made an appointment for a routine checkup, not to undergo expensive surgery for my wisdom teeth. But my dentist insisted, relying on a variety of scare tactics to try to convince me to undergo this expensive -- and completely unnecessary -- procedure. His behavior was highly unethical. He was using his authority and position as "the dentist" to try to scare me into accepting a surgical procedure that I quite obviously didn't need. In fact, even he couldn't give me a good reason for justifying the surgery other than to say, "We usually remove the wisdom teeth quite early." Which means, of course, that they just order the surgery for every child or teenager who walks into the clinic, regardless of whether they actually need it.

Now, it turns out, the removal of wisdom teeth has been found to be an utterly worthless procedure to begin with. It "may do more harm than good" says the British Medical Journal, after reviewing literally thousands of case studies. So the typical dentist is really just hyping a useless procedure, and if your dentist is anything like the dentist I encountered, they're also using all sorts of highly unethical scare tactics to try to force people into undergoing the procedure. That's downright evil, and yet it's a common practice among dentists in the United States.

Posted by Cougar Tuesday, June 13, 2006 (18:11:22)