Comment by pfannkuchen
21 days ago
How do you prove no effect on any bodily system long term? People don’t like to talk about it, or they pretend otherwise, but this is basically impossible.
If the benefit is great enough then the risk makes sense. That is the case in a lot of areas. Is it worth taking a risk of an unknown effect somewhere in the body in exchange for… a marked but not even drastic reduction in cavities…? Not sure…
Fluoride stays in your body, should be some way to measure it?
The bitch about scientific studies is you can’t find what you don’t know to look for. That has to be part of the trade off calculus when deciding what substances to introduce to our internal environment.
> The bitch about scientific studies is you can’t find what you don’t know to look for.
This is only true if you assume that all effects are too small to notice. If you run an experiment on adding fluoride to water, declare an interest in enamel thickness, and then observe that 30% of the experimental group died within six months, you just made a finding that you didn't know you should have been looking for.
Okay? You can still come up with a correlation between net fluoride mass of bones and teeth and negative health traits or outcomes. You can also compare occupational exposure against normal exposure, no drinking water exposure (lived life in country without this policy), etc. There are many different types of scientific studies.
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Fluoride rapidly forms a highly insoluble calcium fluoride salt. So you won't find a lot of it in blood or other easily accessible body fluids.
> The fractional retention or balance of fluoride at any age depends on the quantitative features of absorption and excretion. For healthy, young, or middle-aged adults, approximately 50 percent of absorbed fluoride is retained by uptake in calcified tissues, and 50 percent is excreted in the urine. For young children, as much as 80 percent can be retained owing to increased uptake by the developing skeleton and teeth (Ekstrand et al., 1994a, b). Such data are not available for persons in the later years of life, but based on bone mineral dynamics, it is likely that the fraction excreted is greater than the fraction retained.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK109832/=
> .9 Radiographic detection of teeth and skeletal changes and microscopic examination of affected bone are helpful adjunct procedures for diagnosis.
> Histopathologic and radiographic examination of bones detects bone lesions and tentatively confirms osteofluorosis.14,26 Biopsy or rib or coccygeal vertebrae is used to obtain samples for skeletal fluoride analysis.23
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/B03230...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeletal_fluorosis
> We have developed a localized noninvasive nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) method for determining the accumulated bone fluoride content in human index fingers
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2339643/
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It sounds like people who have time to pay attention to this have a better chance of discerning a methodology of assay.
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