Clumsy leftovers from the days when we dwelled in caves, useful excuses for footballers to miss matches, and Machiavellian tools of political skullduggery - wisdom teeth are a mystery of the modern age. They are also a pain, somewhere towards the back of your neck.
I had my troublesome set of third molars removed last week, at the venerable old age of 25. Wisdom teeth usually thrust their way through your gums into the back of your mouth sometime after you reach 18. More often than wisdom, they herald gum infections, tooth decay and overcrowding.
For a lucky 25% they don't appear at all, but you can never be totally sure you're wisdom-tooth-free. Last summer, 68-year-old Margaret Bickley set a new Guinness world record by sprouting a wisdom tooth. And, in 1990, there was the intriguing case of John Major's wisdom teeth, which were operated on during the weekend before the Conservative party's leadership contest between Margaret Thatcher and Michael Heseltine. Although Mr Major's supporters insisted his appointment with the surgeon had been booked long ago, it conveniently rendered the middle-aged chancellor speechless in the week when his ill-fated leader needed all the vocal support she could get.
Our troubled relationship with our third set of molars is evidence of our evolution from cave dwellers. Neanderthals and prehistoric men and women boasted huge jaws for chomping food in the days before pre-washed and cut bags of lettuce. Since then, our brains have swelled and our jaws have shrunk, but the same number of teeth - 32 - still have to be squeezed into our mouths.
While our anachronistic molars make trouble for our dainty jaws, our enlarged brains invent thousands of horror stories about them. After hearing the umpteenth tale of the patient who woke up from a general anaesthetic to find knee-shaped bruises on their chest, where the dentist had knelt for one final tug on their recalcitrant tooth, I dashed down to the dentist's to plead for a quick local anaesthetic.
My claim to pain came over Christmas, when my third molars rustled up an agonising gum infection, tragically preventing any consumption of turkey or alcohol. Problems usually occur if wisdom teeth are impacted. Through lack of space, they fail to fully emerge in the mouth, crowding other teeth and creating nooks and crannies, where gum infections or tooth decay can flourish.
You can either plump for a general anaesthetic in a hospital and have all your wisdom teeth removed in a state of blissful ignorance, or take a local anaesthetic at a dentist's and have them extracted in a state of anxious awareness. Not a hard choice, except that I originally waited for months for a general anaesthetic, during which time the government's new health watchdog, the National Institute for Clinical Excellence, announced that the NHS would no longer pay for such operations unless they were considered critical. It is hard to say that, yes, your toothache does rather hurt and must take pri ority over people clutching their bleeding heads in A&E.
Studies have also highlighted the risks of general anaesthetics. Researchers from the University of Wales college of medicine discovered that patients who have wisdom teeth removed under general anaesthetic are five times more likely to suffer from nerve damage - leading to temporary or permanent numbness in the gums or tongue - than those who chose a local injection. And, every year, out of the 350,000 patients who have a general anaesthetic for dental surgery, two or three people die.
Particularly after dentists were criticised last year for profiteering from making patients undergo numerous non-essential operations, wisdom teeth are now removed only if they are repeatedly causing pain. Dentists - or oral surgeons, as wisdom teeth specialists are known - won't whip out all four either, if only one or two are kicking up a fuss at the back of your mouth.
You would think that such extractions are much of a muchness, but my friendly, no-nonsense oral surgeon, Babita Arora, who specialises in extracting wisdom teeth, sat me in her chair and warned that it is impossible to predict how difficult removing each impacted wisdom tooth will be.
After watching her spend a Herculean 15 minutes drilling and "elevating" my lower right molar free of my gums, I knew what she meant. Just as I was beginning to lose my grasp of exactly what it was that Destiny's Child were singing on the overhead TV, Babita announced that the final bit of root had been cleaved free. My remaining three teeth were then expertly whipped out instantly (in two sittings), with the sort of satisfying crunch with which you used to crack your baby teeth out.
The recovery period, related to the degree of difficulty in extracting the impacted teeth, is similarly difficult to predict. Some people's faces are swollen like hamsters' for two weeks; for others, the pain dissipates in a day. Pathetic journalists can sit in bed writing about their toothache, but even tough members of boy bands, such as 5ive singer Scott Robinson, and hardened footballers, such as Tony Adams (whose wisdom teeth were removed last year after physiotherapists suggested it would help alleviate his chronic back pain), take time off to recuperate.
Dosed up on painkillers, rinsing regularly with warm salty water to prevent renewed infections, and living on a diet of soup and mashed potato, I can report that life without my wisdom teeth is considerably less painful than life with them. My mouth feels as capacious as a caveman's, which has to be a step forwards.
And, with several bloodied and rather unattractively yellowed molars in my possession, I have the perfect way of recouping some of cash I invested in my dental discomfort. Is 20p still the going rate for the tooth fairy?
