Extract Useless Wisdom Tooth In Spite of no Pain

When Mr. Niu became our patient 10 years ago, the tooth #1 (a top wisdom tooth) had a cavity (Fig.1 *).  He listened to our advice to have it out as well as the bottom wisdom tooth (#32, as compared to X-ray in Fig.2).  The other bottom wisdom tooth, #17, is useless, because the top one is gone (Fig.1,1').  Since there was no pain associated with the tooth #17, Mr. Niu has declined to have it taken out.  Recently he develops severe pain in that area.  New X-ray shows that the pain is not from the wisdom tooth.  Instead, the neighboring molar tooth has a cavity (Fig.2': *) and needs root canal treatment! 

Without the top wisdom tooth, the bottom one moves upward (compare Fig.1',2') so that food is easily trapped between the teeth, which gradually leads to the cavity in the neighboring tooth.  What is a trouble.  In one word, remove a useless wisdom tooth no matter whether it has pain or not.

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Xin Wei, DDS, PhD, MS 1st edition 01/02/2016, last revision 01/02/2016