Toothpaste isn't a poison, it contains relatively high concentrations of a known toxin, sodium fluoride, which also has topical benefits on the teeth. Though the amounts certainly vary widely from person to person, toothpaste is typically ingested to some small extent during and after brushing, even by adults but especially by children. Sodium fluoride, the product typically used in toothpaste, has seen somewhat better scientific review than the products typically used in water fluoridation, which usually are indeed, as Oxy said, a chemical waste that results of the industrial production of artificial fertilizer and some metals. It's a relatively big break on these industries that a substance they used to have to pay out the nose to dispose of can now be offloaded onto municipalities as a health product. The notion that there could be funded pressure from these industries behind the prevalence and wide acceptance of water fluoridation in North America, especially when water fluoridation was first introduced, is hardly a ludicrous one given the nature of the initial advertising campaigns in the 40's/50's, and it's source.
we have been over the fact that there are guidelines to this just as there are guidelines to any medicine.
please name a single other
medication, which you acknowledge fluoride is, where the 'guidelines' are a one-size-fits-all dose for every single person in a community; fetus, infant, child, adolescent, adult, race, height, weight, rate, prior conditions, other medications, and outside factors all being completely irrelevant.
This is so so so false. You're not even addressing or responding to anything of substance that is posted here anymore.
Fluoridated drinking water probably has a topical effect as well as a systemic effect. Systemic fluorides can give topical protection because ingested fluoride is present in saliva, which continually bathes the teeth.
Again, fluoride is a
TOPICAL PRODUCT even where ingestion is concerned. So you're ingesting a topical product, which finds its way into your system, (saliva, blood, bones, pineal gland), and thus provides a topical effect on your teeth through its presence in your spit. It's pharmaceutical application where your teeth are concerned remains topical in nature, and there's mention of no other systemic benefit. In the 1940's 50's, the belief, or at least the claim, was that ingestion of fluoride even prior to the eruption of teeth had a positive and considerable systemic effect in fortifying teeth as they developed. This was one of the major selling points of fluoridation.
Now you continue to say that fluoridated water is medically useless when I've posted plenty of statements by the general scientific and dental communities to the contrary. If you're holding on to experts in the documentary you posted, the case is the same as any other conspiracy. You can find "experts" that will get on board with almost anything but the data and literature doesn't support what they are saying. At all.
I've stated only that fluoridated water's effect is topical, and -INGESTING- it is of no medical benefit because of that. Again, you're treating this as a conspiracy theory and not a very real deliberation over the validity of a branch of medical science. If you wan't to call the idea that industries are backing water fluoridation a conspiracy theory, you're entitled... but the term simply does not apply in the case of the developing discussion of the benefits and risks of water fluoridation. Medical science is by no means written in stone- the exact opposite is true of it, in fact. It
needs to constantly and thoroughly reevaluate itself, but inherently those efforts are very often met with heavy and sometimes popular resistance, for all sorts of complex reasons. Hysteria was a common clinical diagnosis in women for over a hundred years. Whenever a woman got a little too noticeably stressed, or had an upsetting emotional outburst/breakdown, she might be diagnosed with hysteria. The 'treatment' for hysteria was a practice ranging from assisted masturbation in the willing higher class to what amounted to rape in a clinical setting in those less willing/able to consent. If a case of Hysteria was deemed beyond treatment, the 'cure' was the surgical removal of the uterus. This is why that particular procedure has the rather unorthodox name of hysterectomy. Hysteria continued to be diagnosed until the 1970's. If medical evidence begins to suggest a commonly held and very popular medical practice is of no real benefit, and the source of this evidence is career professionals submitting their work to public review, you should at the very least hear them out, rather than dismiss what they have to say as nonsense and quackery simply because they disagree with the popular belief.
Perhaps I jumped into this thread with guns blazing and it immediately put you on the defensive.
It's your exceedingly dismissive attitude that puts me on the defensive, trigger. You're putting words in my mouth and suggesting me foolish for speaking them, while providing nothing particularly productive in advancing the discussion. Dan at least is making an effort to support his own assertions.
First you state that you'll refrain from posting pictures of dental fluorosis. The subtext being that dental fluorosis is so unsightly that you're just trying to spare our feelings... oh my, what drama.
But then you go ahead and post a bunch of very emotive pictures anyway. Of the pictures you post (and this is the important part), the majority depict only the most severe cases. Your statement in the caption about the high prevalence of fluorosis in conjunction with a bunch of pictures of severe cases gives the impression that brown pitted teeth is the norm. Well, it's not.
It was actually a personal thing. I don't personally enjoy looking at close-up shots of messed up teeth and mouths. I later in the thread posted an image, taken directly from a google of 'dental fluorosis' and what would fit in my screen, which was by no means an amalgamation of all the nastiest fluorosis photos I could find. The little tyke with the toothbrush should make that pretty clear. I posted it because there seemed to be some lack of awareness of dental fluorosis as a condition. I know all about dental fluorosis and its ranges. As I said I've a mild case myself.
That is an example of how you misrepresent facts and it's typical behaviour adopted by most opponents of fluoride. It's disingenuous, manipulative and embarrassingly transparent.
My copy-and-pasting the result of a google search is all those things, huh...? Wow, I'm an insidious fuck, aren't I?
I tried. If you can't understand something as basic as why correlation does not imply causation then I'm almost done here. Wikipedia might have better luck with you. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correla...mply_causation
You're really, REALLY hung up on the word correlation. You know it's the word
I used, right? Not the term used in the study itself which you've dismissed?
Each increase in 1 mg/L of urine fluoride associated with 0.59-point decrease in IQ (P=0.0226). Meanwhile, there was a dose-response relationship between urine fluoride and dental fluorosis (P<0.0001). In conclusion, our study suggested that low levels of fluoride exposure in drinking water had negative effects on children's intelligence and dental health and confirmed the dose-response relationships between urine fluoride and IQ scores as well as dental fluorosis.
They don't call it a correlation. They call it a 'dose-response relationship'. But, sure, lets focus on my use of the word correlation with pirate-to-temp diagrams with totally made-up figures. Reasonable debate if I ever saw it.