6. Fluoride
The largest American study ever conducted on fluoride and tooth decay examined 39,207 children aged five to seventeen, using examiners trained by the National Institute of Dental Research, across fluoridated, non-fluoridated, and partially fluoridated communities. It found no significant difference in the rate of decayed, missing, or filled teeth. It was published in 1986 to 1987. It has never been refuted. It has been quietly ignored.²? The Journal of the American Dental Association confirmed the same finding in July 2009: children’s cavity rates are similar regardless of fluoridation status.²? The Newburgh-Kingston fifty-year comparison trial, the foundational fluoridation experiment, found the only significant difference between the towns was that Newburgh had approximately twice the rate of dental fluorosis (mottled, discolored, structurally weakened teeth). Western European countries that never fluoridated their water had the same decline in tooth decay over the same decades as the United States. No double-blind study of fluoridation as a cavity preventive has ever been conducted. This is the intervention dentistry calls its greatest public health achievement.
The original theory was systemic: ingest fluoride during childhood, harden enamel, fewer cavities. The profession has retreated. Current research concedes the anti-cavity effect, to the extent it exists, is topical. It works at the surface, not through the bloodstream. If the mechanism is topical, the rationale for swallowing fluoride collapses. You would no more swallow fluoride to strengthen your teeth than you would swallow sunscreen to prevent sunburn.²?
The substance Americans are asked to swallow is fluosilicic acid, captured from the scrubbers on Florida phosphate fertilizer plant smokestacks. Before capture, it was a regulated air pollutant that killed crops and crippled cattle in the surrounding countryside. Mohawk cows downwind of an aluminum plant in Massena, New York, crawled across pastures on their bellies because their bones were too damaged by fluoride emissions to support standing. The substance the phosphate industry could not legally dump into air or water was rebranded for injection into the drinking water of more than 200 million Americans.³?
The Manhattan Project required vast quantities of fluoride for uranium enrichment. Harold Hodge, the senior fluoride toxicologist for the Project, became the public face of fluoridation safety research in the 1950s and 1960s, the man who trained a generation of dental school deans. While the citizens of Newburgh were told that fluoride would prevent cavities in their children, blood and tissue samples from Newburgh residents were sent secretly to Hodge’s atomic laboratory for study. The dental experiment and the radiation experiment were the same experiment.³¹
The biological data: fluoride accumulates in the pineal gland, where it disrupts melatonin and shifts the onset of puberty. It displaces iodine in the thyroid, producing hypothyroidism. The National Research Council concluded fluoride “can subtly alter endocrine function, especially in the thyroid.”³² Hypothyroidism was treated with fluoride in European medicine before fluoride became a dental additive. The suppressive daily dose was 2 to 5 milligrams, easily reached by a modern adult drinking fluoridated water and using fluoridated toothpaste. One part per million, the level deliberately added to drinking water, inhibits a cellular repair enzyme by fifty percent in Wolfgang Klein’s published demonstration.³³ Chinese epidemiological studies repeatedly show IQ reduction in children exposed to fluoride at levels comparable to US drinking water. Dean Burk, former chief chemist at the National Cancer Institute, testified before Congress in 1981 that he attributed more than 40,000 annual US cancer deaths to fluoridation.³?
The Environmental Protection Agency’s deputy assistant administrator for water wrote in 1983 that disposing of phosphate-industry fluoride waste in public water supplies was “an ideal environmental solution to a long standing problem.”³? She did not mean the problem of caries. She meant the problem of what to do with the waste.
Original article online at: https://unbekoming.substack.com/p/12-things-your-dentist-was-trained