News & Articles

Fluoride is a drug,
not a nutrient

Aty rate, fluoride is a drug - not a nutrient - and therefore adding fluoride in any form to community water supplies is medicating people involuntarily. Folks who may not need and don’t want to ingest the stuff are swallowing the drug against their wills. This is a civil liberty issue if there ever was one and an issue that should be worthy of re-examination and free discussion.

Like all my physician colleagues (and my dentist father-in-law), in the early days of big push by industry to fluoridate municipal water, I was the victim of a dis-information campaign. I was convinced by unproven claims of safety and efficacy from industry-propagated pseudoscience, and I was therefore duped into supporting a position that I can no longer uphold.

I found myself in favor of forced fluoridation, but it was partly because I refused to listen to the science presented by the anti-fluoridation experts. I now recall having twinges of conscience when I saw that nobody was actually doing fluoride assays of anybody’s home drinking water. And I also remember twinges of guilt whenever I was confronted by cases of dental fluorosis in my pediatric patients. I had nothing to say to them except to recommend stopping the fluoride vitamin
 

So I stopped prescribing the AMA-mandated fluoride-laced liquid vitamins (for babies) and the fluoride tablets (for toddlers and young children) to any child, vitamins that my young patients were supposed to take in our particular region of northern Minnesota, because by that time I knew that I was overdosing some of them. But I didn’t know which ones were being poisoned by the fluoride. And so I didn’t warn anybody about the risks of iatrogenic dental fluorosis. In my defense, my AMA had not informed me about the iatrogenic disease of fluoride-induced skeletal fluorosis so, out of ignorance, I hadn’t warned anybody about that brittle bone proble
 

Involuntary fluoridation has surely poisoned many unaware innocents, beyond just causing mottled teeth, brittle bones and lowered IQs. Children who may already be getting safe levels of fluoride in their drinking water (if there is indeed an actual safe level) may be ingesting other sources by just using fluoride toothpaste. Lots of children inadvertently swallow some of their candy flavored Crest or Colgate, the tubes of which have, by law, poison warning labels on them that most everybody ignores, especially toddlers, who can’t read the warnings. In the past year there were over 23,000 cases of possible fluoride toothpaste adverse reactions reported to Poison Control Centers across the US. Mild cases of fluoride poison usually manifests as stomach pain, nausea, vomiting, headache, dizziness, and flu-like symptoms. Serious poisoning can result in death.

FDA warnings are not given out willy-nilly. Some very serious poisonings of children from fluoridated toothpaste must have prompted this FDA-mandated warning, which says:

“WARNING: Keep out of reach of children under 6 years of age. If you accidentally swallow more than used for brushing, seek professional help or contact a poison control center immediately.”

Besides the risks of swallowing toothpaste, what about the absorption of fluoride across the buccal mucosa? I would venture to guess that there are no good studies measuring the phenomenon of fluoride absorption across the buccal mucosa while brushing one’s teeth -  much less any study of the long-term consequences of such absorption.

 
Fluoride is a known thyrotoxin

Fluoride-containing compounds are known to be especially toxic to the thyroid gland and to the brain. Fluoride compounds are well known (along with bromide and chloride) to displace iodine from the thyroid hormones during the metabolic process! In the metabolism of the thyroid hormone, fluorinated (as well as chlorinated) compounds poison the enzyme deiodinase, which converts the far less active T4 hormone to the more active T3 that the body relies on for proper health and energy!

I read a study in an obscure toxicology journal a decade ago that looked at the adverse effects on thyroid function caused by the fluorinated “anti-depressant” drug Paxil. (Note that the study results can logically be extrapolated to virtually all of the fluorinated SSRIs [Zoloft is the only non-fluorinated naturally long-acting SSRI but it is a chlorinated compound with two chlorine atoms attached to its amphetamine-type base molecule]). The study showed that Paxil caused a significant decrease in both T4 and T3 over time. Of course, since the study was never published in any of the mainstream medical journals, very few prescribing physicians were aware of it. Mainstream medical journals, as you know, are heavily subsidized by Big Pharma. Whoever pays the piper, calls the tune.

The list below includes other common prescription drugs that are fluorinated and therefore may be toxic to the thyroid gland, brain and other body tissues:

1) antidepressants like Prozac, Luvox, Paxil, Celexa and Lexapro,

2) antipsychotics like Risperdal and Haldol,

3) all the fluoroquinolone antibiotics like Cipro and Levaquin (and the lethal and now-off-the-market Trovan,

4) the statin drugs Crestor and Baycol (the latter was particularly lethal and is now banned),

5) the Vioxx look-alike anti-inflammatory drug Celebrex,

6) the antifungal drug Diflucan,

7) the antimalarial drug Lariam,

8) the now-banned anti-reflux drug Propulsid,

9) the inhalant  general anesthetic Halothane (which is bristling with chloride, bromide as well as fluoride atoms).

It needs to be noted that fluorination (and chlorination) of any drug dramatically increases the serum half-life of the drug (as well as the brain half-life in the case of psychoactive drugs) by inhibiting the metabolic degradation by the P-450 liver enzyme systems. Therefore the excretion of the drug is impaired and the duration of action of the “long-acting” drug is increased.

This intended consequence of fluorination therefore allows the drug to be marketed as a once-a-day long-acting dosing formulation, a highly desirable trait, because the drug industry knows that patients often forget to take two or three times a day drugs.  But the downside for patients is the fact that these synthetic fluorinated drugs may multiply the toxic effects of any other source of fluoride (or chloride or bromide)! Check out the sobering pharmaceutical journal article on the fluorination of drugs at: http://www.iptonline.com/articles/public/IPTFOUR74NP.pdf

Well that should be enough of a justification for somebody to urge our community leaders to inform themselves about an issue that has likely been sickening folks, lowering our children’s IQs, adversely affecting everybody’s physical and mental health and putting us all at risk for borderline hypothyroidism and brain dysfunction.


The Precautionary Principle

The Precautionary Principle is the precept that an action should not be taken if the consequences of that action are uncertain and potentially dangerous The PP demands that society thoroughly looks at all potential sources of toxicity and pollution and demands that the producers of those potentially toxic substances prove them to be safe both short and long-term before they are released onto the environment.

Tragically, contrary to corporate entities in the European Union, polluting American industries (particularly the defense, chemical, oil, pipeline, mining, transportation and pharmaceutical industries) never apply that protective principle in their business models! Hence thousands of polluting US entities such as Monsanto, Dow Chemical, BP, Exxon-Mobil, Alcoa, the Pentagon, etc, etc are either personas non grata in Europe or they behave themselves there, while at the same time legally operating with impunity in the US - with the blessing of their co-conspirators on Wall Street and in the US Congress.

Polluting US industries, eager to pad next quarter’s earnings reports (and therefore their share price), have their bloated stable of cunning lawyers and lobbyists search for legal ways to screw the planet and its people by dumping unregulated, untested and toxic substances into the public’s water, air and soil before knowing everything we need to know about the long-term health consequences of their poison products. The PP is bad for business because it’s bad for profits. It almost seems like the CEO industrialists of the 1% that head up polluting companies are saying, in effect, “you people and your planet can go to hell for all we care. We’ll risk the extinction of mankind if we want to. We don’t need you useless eaters because we have our fortunes, our gated communities, our body guards and the police and military to protect our luxury wealth from you.” Say it isn’t true.

 

I encourage all concerned citizens to re-educate themselves on this and other important issues and add your public voices to the cause if and when the opportunity arises (and, at the least, try to avoid unnecessary exposure to potential toxins, not just in the water we all drink, but also in the food supply and in the air we all breathe.

There are many good websites to start the consciousness-raising process concerning forced fluoridation. A good place to start is the website of a group of concerned parents from Canada that call themselves Parents of Fluoride Poisoned Children (www.PFPC.com). Another is the Fluoride Action Network (www.fluoridealert.org).

Interestingly, when I accidentally typed in the .com address rather than the .org address I was immediately linked to the American Dental Association’s pro-fluoridation website.

 

Go figure.