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Teeth play a crucial role in each person's health and everyday life. Seeing the dentist at least twice a year, along with brushing and flossing on a daily basis, comes highly recommended in the name of good oral hygiene.

Wisdom and molar teeth - the ones furthest back in the mouth - can be more prone to issues than incisors. Further back teeth also tend to have more crevices, which may make them more vulnerable to cavities.

Because of the issues that can emerge with wisdom teeth, some people - and even dentists - will recommend undergoing oral surgery to have them all extracted. However, removing healthy wisdom teeth is not always advisable.

It can disrupt other teeth in your mouth

Anyone who goes to a dentist's office and gets an x-ray of their mouth will see the placement of their wisdom teeth. Barring ones that are fractured, impacted, or otherwise less than optimal, many wisdom teeth play a role in chewing and breaking down certain foods.

Opting to undergo extractions for wisdom teeth that haven't caused any problems means having fewer healthy teeth in your mouth. It also means your remaining teeth will take on more effort in chewing and breaking down food.

Over time, this could make them more susceptible to cavities or other problems that require professional treatment. Your remaining teeth may also shift to fill the gaps created by the aforementioned extractions.

If a wisdom tooth becomes impacted, severely damaged, or a source of pain in your mouth, having a dentist or oral surgeon extract it may be a good idea. Yet, having your healthy wisdom teeth pulled out of your mouth - just because they require more effort to keep clean - is playing with fire.

Tooth extraction is not a risk-free process

While some dentists recommend removing wisdom teeth to free up room in your mouth or eliminate the possibility of these teeth causing problems later down the line, undergoing an extraction comes with serious risks of its own.

According to the National Institutes of Health, undergoing tooth extraction comes with the following potential hazards:

• Harm to neighboring teeth
• Oral nerve damage
• Bruising
• Facial swelling
• Gum infection

Undergoing these risks for severely damaged wisdom teeth makes sense. Taking them on just to extract healthy, functioning wisdom teeth does not.

In many cases, people may find they're better off doing the work to care for teeth further back in their mouths. This is much more sensible than simply removing wisdom teeth in the name of so-called convenience or prevention of a problem that has yet to materialize (and may never).