The new research is the first to measure community water fluoridation exposure during childhood and any potential impact on cognition up to age 80.
The paper is here
So why is this news coming out now? We are good without flouride .
Because it’s a dirt cheap public health intervention with measurable positive outcomes that has come under attack by people who think “chemicals are bad”.
except when you inject them in your pp to make it hard.
Our teeth aren’t good without fluoride.
adults will be fine. it’s kids who get fucked w/o fluoridation, and will have lifelong dental issues.
Alternative headline: Science disproves well known conspiracy theory again; conspiracy theorists deny evidence.
yeah I felt that way with the tynlenol one the other day. Its like we are using resources for this. ugh.
Honestly, I don’t mind spending resources on this. Yes it turned out that the expected results were the ones we got, but until you do the study, you can’t be sure you won’t get unexpected results. Plus, once you’ve collected the data, it sometimes shows unrelated patterns that you wouldn’t otherwise have been able to see.
people don’t understand science at all.
It’s not a ‘do it once and it’s the truth forever’ type of thing. It’s a perpetual process. You are SUPPOSED TO REPEAT STUDIES. Result replication is the point. You also re-do studies to create new datasets, see if baselines have shifted etc.
The notion science is some system of eternal truths is not science. That’s Scientism… where science has been elevated to a extra-empirical authority.
It’s also why you do experiments in science class… and you compare results.
anyway, a couple of times I tried to explain this to people, even as a teacher, and they basically told me that means science is stupid and worthless if that is how you are suppose to do it. people generally, do not think science is an empirical process, they think it should be revelatory, like the ten commandments.
People crave certainty. Like are obsessed with it. They will do anything to obtain it including believing all kinds of wildly untrue things. Intuition is usually associated with these hard fictions.
Science starts from the premise that the universe is uncertain. Uncertainty is baked into all scientific measurements. This mindset leads to true knowledge but it is fundamentally not how people are naturally wired to think. It takes repeated practice to stay scientifically minded even if you are trained in the practice and you exercise it regularly. It’s uncomfortable to stay in the uncertain place for long periods of time for most people. Regression to certainty is the norm, science is the exception.
I give people a lot of empathy for the certainty mindset, even if it is wrong it helps people cope with the gaping abyss of uncertainty. It’s not an easy thing to grapple with.
Oh I have met plenty of scientists who are scientific only about their own research field. And complete dumbasses about anything else, like they do biology all day but can’t drive for shit because they have zero understanding of the laws of physics, including gravity, and they get hyper defensive if you tease them about this.
It’s mind-boggling, but that’s just how human beings are. And if you aren’t wired like that… it’s pretty hard to socialize successfully because social group identity is so often solely generated on shared beliefs many of which are ‘hard fictions’.
When crunchy lefties were first spouting off about this, they at least had an explanation. It was a nonsense explanation rooted in woo-woo pseudoscience and mysticism, but it was at least an explanation. Also, most people were inoculated against that kind of bullshit, we knew they were slightly crazy and wrong, and it was a view that was relatively harmless and allowed to exist. Most places it was “go ahead, you do you - drink your fluoride-free water and let your teeth rot, but you have to source your water yourself - this municipality fluoridates for the public good, it’s backed by science and dental experts, etc.”
These new crazy people, most of them don’t even have an explanation. (some of them are actually the same people, just moved down the alt-right pipeline after a couple decades of propaganda). If you were to ask them why they think fluoride is bad you could get responses ranging from blank stares to actual physical attacks. Transmission of conspiracy theories is so supercharged in this environment - all you have to do is jump on a bandwagon, and your buddies in the same club as you will give you the approval you desperately need just for wearing that opinion on your sleeve - no critical thought required, just base monkey instinct. This is such an irresistible way of belonging to some group and getting that special feeling that it’s becoming a real problem for most of us.
A small minority of these folks are (small L) libertarians or anti-authoritarians who believe in bodily sovereignty. That’s a rational thought process that I can actually sympathize with, so they get a minimum amount of points for having a comprehensible, defensible position. They just shouldn’t be able to force their choice on everyone else. (That would seem to contradict their own philosophy anyway). The public good of fluoridation, backed by science and experts, should vastly outweigh even that position. As before with the crunchy hippies, fine, it’s your right to choose what goes into your body - along with that comes the responsibility to take care of that for yourself, in line with your own stated ideals.
What was lefty uber-liberal hippieism got co-opted during covid by right wingers and fascist science deniers.
they are all the same people.
they just have different origin stories for their crazy beliefs.
This is such an irresistible way of belonging to some group and getting that special feeling that it’s becoming a real problem for most of us.
It’s a base human drive, that is far more powerful than critical thought. The only reason we sort of got around this was we had built institutions and had collective identities… and a lot of that is crumbling away the past few decades.
So people are reverting to forming their own little tribes around some niche set of beliefs to make them feel empowered. As most of them no longer feel apart of their larger tribe.
Anecdotally, I left a volunteer org I’d been a part of for ten years because this brainrot had taken it over. The new members wanted our org to some super special club for cool people only, instead of being just open to anyone and my emphasis on it being open and accessible made me persona non grata. BECAUSE HOW COULD I NOT WANT TO FEEL SPECIAL AND SUPERIOR. oh, and they also started saying they should be paid for volunteer work… because felt they ‘deserved’ all that money we were getting from donations from the public…
i feel like if you drew a venn diagram containing people who complain about fluoride in the water and people who argue we should bring back leaded gasoline, it would just be a circle. making this study particularly hilarious
who argues that? I haven’t seen that.
And what is their reason? that it would be cheaper?
Not recently but last I heard it was from boomers that are mad kids aren’t drinking out of hoses and riding bikes on the roads.
Any changes for safety, they presume, make us weak.
I see kids riding bikes on the roads and drinking from hoses, and I live in a major city.
I see bikes too, less numbers. Haven’t seen hose drinkers in a long time. Just had a conversation with my youngest today that we didn’t carry water bottles in school when I was young, we just used water fountains.
he was appalled :)
don’t you fill up a water bottle at a water fountain?
But it does have an effect on dental health! A positive one!
HEALTHY TEETH AND GUMS ARE THE FIRST STEP OF THE TRANS IDEOLOGY.
