UKCAF website

A sideways look at water fluoridation:
where do we go next?

Doug Cross
21 September 2016

Don't you ever get tired of the never-ending fluoridation debate? The ceaseless round of name-calling, argument, counter-argument, bullying, and just plain stupidity that infests this persistent medical charade?

The hysterical reactions to almost any news, however minor, that mentions any substance that contains the dreaded letters 'FLUOR'?

The endless parade of Councils whose Members decide to stop fluoridation, only to be replaced later with new Members who vote to start it all up again – and then who are then replaced yet again by more Councillors who reject it?

Does nobody ever say' “Enough of this madness!”

I've watched – not always from the sidelines – as 'experts' on both sides of the fence clashed in heated, and, generally ridiculous, repetitive debates in Council Chambers, Town Halls, and conferences around the world. As for Internet debates on press coverage of the subject, nothing is too stupid for publication!

Only today the 'Futurism' web site reported that the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia has found "fluoride in potable water to be safe for consumption, in optimum levels. The study saw that fluoridation had no link with low IQ, cancer, or any other perceived health risks." It would be hilarious, if it weren't so terribly sad.

Occasionally I've intervened, exposing some particularly absurd eruption of ignorance, stupidity or fraud for public entertainment (whatever DID happen to Britain's National Fluoride Information Centre scam?)

And I've embarrassed leading politicians and cautioned scientists on both sides of the divide over their deliberate misuse of data and utter disregard for the proper use of statistics. A little education would surely be a sensible start - and a little is exactly what they seem to have.

A waste of time?

And what effects have my little excursions into ridicule had? Virtually none! The pro-fluoridation lobby – well, apart from Public Health England, that is - seems to have become just a little bit more sensitive to mockery than those against the practice, even though its ignorance remains untarnished by common sense.

And it's the same everywhere.
The anti-fluoridation sector brigade itself is far from perfect, but appears impervious to my taunts and musings, and soldiers on happily with its obsession with diseases that may - or indeed, that may not – be associated with ingestible fluoride. As for law - perish the thought. It's not science, you see, and they have a hard enough time with that already.

When its members have been wrong, they seem determined to remain so (confirmation bias infects both sides), and thus they play into the hands of their opponents and their public relations cronies.

The rules of the game for fluoride pushers are different from those that the anti-fluoridation science camp relies on, and are more effective when dealing with scientifically illiterate politicians.

It's all so silly. I've asked both sides the simplest yet crucial of questions. If fluoridation law is independent of medical law, who says that its proponents can choose which set of laws to obey and which to ignore?

And if medical law says such therapeutic products may only be used once they've been granted an appropriate product licence, aren't all the arguments and research over whether fluoride is 'safe and effective' completely irrelevant? So far, I haven't had an answer from either side.

Above their heads

The real problem is that those who promote fluoridation believe absolutely that it works, and refuse to accept that close examination of the research on which they rely shows that it is of poor quality. That's not a good basis for any public health activity affecting the entire community.

Equally, opponents of the practice – even those with scientific credentials, relentlessly sporting their Brownie Badge of Office to prove it – fail to recognise that research into a prohibited intervention is simply a waste of time and money: the amount of research funding wasted on 'fluoride research' over the years is truly staggering.

Very few Councillors,have the necessary scientific expertise to decide if the claims of either side are credible, yet it is they who are expected to decide on whether or not to support fluoridation.

The same applies to dental practitioners – almost all endorse the practice, yet don't have the training to actually analyse the reliability of what they have simply learned by rote, from dental school onwards.

And when national public health organisations, such as Public Health England (PHE), issue misleading propaganda designed to promote the practice, ignoring independent expertise that discredits their politically correct but wrong opinions, then it's time to call them to account.

Such medical malpractice is too dangerous to tolerate.

What we want is a precedent!

So, what are the proponents of fluoridation most afraid of? Simply this - they are terrified that medical law might be applied to public health practice. The give-away on this is that even the regulator of medicinal products, the MHRA, refuses

to recognise the inconvenient truth that fluoridated water is legally a medicine.

This misapplication of medical law is the key subterfuge that enables PHE to deny that medical law applies to fluoridated drinking water, and so assure the idiot public (that's us) that fluoridation can't be what we all really know it to be - mass medication.

Such collusion to mislead the public and carry out an illegal assault on the public in the guise of it being 'for the good of the people' is an obscenity, and demands an immediate criminal inquiry.

A clear decision by a Court that this product may only be supplied to the public once it has been granted a licence for medicinal use would knock the stuffing out of these authoritarian acolytes of compulsory medication.

Such a decision by a senior Judge would immediately bring the practice to an ignominious halt, and raise the vile spectre of State-imposed medication without consent.

And whilst not binding under other State legislatures elsewhere, it would send a powerful signal – a legal precedent – to many others around the world.

Once one State accepts that fluoridated water is indeed a medicinal product, because it is used with the intention of preventing a human disease, others would be forced to reconsider their own approach to this absurdly prolonged malpractice. It is no secret that if Britain were to take this course, fluoridation elsewhere would rapidly collapse.

After all, it's just not going to happen in Scotland (Nichola herself assured us on that, not so long back), the Welsh Assembly won't entertain the idea (again, personal assurances from inside Welsh Assembly), and it's no longer legal in Northern Ireland. It's only the dumb English who seem disposed to be treated like dozing morons and allow it to happen to them and their kids!

Strengthening public understanding

This is why I've given both sides proof that fluoridated water is legally a medicine, a view endorsed by leading legal experts. In this context, the public slogan that fluoridation is indeed mass medication, is absolutely correct, and becomes a powerful rallying cry that cannot be ignored in a democratic society.

Remarkably, neither side seems able to understand that this really is the key factor in this ridiculous confrontation. I guess that they're all too busy throwing rocks (well, insults, anyway) at each other to notice.

The international prohibition on any form of enforced medication emerged from the Nuremberg Trials, and is instinctively accepted by both public and the medical profession as ethically and morally correct. The entire medical code is founded on such robust and absolute principles as informed positive individual consent.

The pro-fluoridation slogan, claiming that it's 'safe and effective', is at last being countered by the far more comprehensible (and legally correct) rejection of fluoridation as 'mass medication' by the State. Ultimately, it is this understanding, and the formal legal support that underpins it, that will force an end to this detested practice.

What are we gonna do now?

So what needs to be done now? As far as yet more analysis – both scientific and legal – is concerned, nothing at all. We don't need yet more dental research into fluoridation. Nor do we need to carry out more toxicological studies into its proposed effects on other conditions.

Nor do we need to argue yet again that it's NOT legal to supply an unlicensed medicinal product to entire populations, either with or without consent. This is already totally established in both European and domestic law (and in many other Federal and State legislatures as well).

When Lord Jauncey observed. back in 1983, that fluoridation is subject to section 130 of the Medicines Act, (put simply, that it's legally a medicine) that was the definitive ruling that PHE and the MHRA now dismiss at their own hazard.

Public health practice depends on an ethical approach to medication that is totally at odds with conventional medical ethics It attempts to obtain 'the best result for the most people', with costs playing a central role in choosing which intervention strategy to apply.(see sections 2 and 3 of my recent paper on fluoridation).

In doing so, it accepts that this may harm a minority, an issue that is repugnant to the ethical framework of personal medicinal practice.

No choice – ALL relevant laws must be obeyed

All that is needed now is a high-level Judicial Review to establish that the administration of fluoridated water to the public is permissible only when both fluoridation and medicinal law are applied to this practice.

These two arms of the law are NOT in conflict. Medicinal law kicks o top of fluoridation law when the product is to be used with intent to control of human disease (dental decay).

The persistent refusal of health authorities everywhere to obey both sets of laws is at the heart of this central issue of mass medication.

Abolish this malpractice and fluoridation will be just one of those temporary inexplicable medical madnesses that afflict the gullible when they attempt to bully others into accepting their own idiosyncratic beliefs.