Comment 27653

By Ted Mitchell (registered) | Posted December 01, 2008 at 17:26:09

Wow, this has gotten out of hand!

I see recurring themes of 1. fluoride doesn't work, and 2. fluoride causes all sorts of harms.

As for 1, I can only look at the published science and interpret it. There are concepts like publication bias that could account for published data not being representative of actual data, but this is nearly impossible to determine, for fluoride or for anything else.

From the meta-analysis above, here are a couple of diagrams, please check them out! http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/article... http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/article...

Compared to the amount of benefit from your typical prescribed drug that has undergone meta-analysis, this is pretty solid data. Physicians care about this statistical concept that underlies much of the basis of modern medicine and it is the best tool that tells us what is safe and effective. More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochrane_Co...

So if have a level of skepticism that says, "that isn't true", for consistency you have to apply the same rule to everything else. This would take thousands of drugs off the shelf, and we'd only be left with some vaccines and maybe aspirin as prescribing options!

POint 2 is way more difficult to disprove. Again, if you use the gold standard that proves safety, i.e. large RCT's, many substances that would be unethical to administer in a blinded study would have to come off the market, e.g. all pesticides. So we're stuck with observational studies, which are known to be inferior to RCTs.

We're also beyond the point of being able to study fluoridation cleanly, because of globalized food distribution. This has the effect of blunting the difference between fluoridated / non-fluoridated areas.

Because of this, I absolutely support a change in studying fluoride that looks not only at source levels but body levels - but that's going to be expensive and difficult to test thousands of people.

One final wish, please are there any epidemiologists / toxicologists out there, known to be objective Mr. Spock types, who would care to comment?

Permalink | Context

Events Calendar

There are no upcoming events right now.
Why not post one?

Recent Articles

Article Archives

Blog Archives

Site Tools

Feeds