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It is a scenario playing out nationwide. From Oregon to Pennsylvania, hundreds of communities have in recent years either stopped adding fluoride to their water supplies or voted to prevent its addition. Supporters of such bans argue that people should be given the freedom of choice. The broad availability of over-the-counter dental products containing the mineral makes it no longer necessary to add to public water supplies, they say. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that while store-bought products reduce tooth decay, the greatest protection comes when they are used in combination with water fluoridation.
The outcome of an ongoing federal case in California could force the Environmental Protection Agency to create a rule regulating or banning the use of fluoride in drinking water nationwide. In the meantime, the trend is raising alarm bells for public health researchers who worry that, much like vaccines, fluoride may have become a victim of its own success.
The CDC maintains that community water fluoridation is not only safe and effective but also yields significant cost savings in dental treatment. Public health officials say removing fluoride could be particularly harmful to low-income families — for whom drinking water may be the only source of preventive dental care.
“If you have to go out and get care on your own, it’s a whole different ballgame,” said Myron Allukian Jr., a dentist and past president of the American Public Health Association. Millions of people have lived with fluoridated water for years, “and we’ve had no major health problems,” he said. “It’s much easier to prevent a disease than to treat it.”
According to the anti-fluoride group Fluoride Action Network, since 2010, over 240 communities around the world have removed fluoride from their drinking water or decided not to add it.
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Have you ever been wrong? If so, there’s no reason to consider to your comment because your input is irrelevant.
It is possible to be a good source of information that has come to the wrong conclusion using the best information provided. As long as you update your conclusions as more information becomes available, no harm no foul.
Especially when it comes to a novel virus… which is what I assume they were alluding to when chastising the CDC for making a mistake. They updated their advice as the information became available through research.
Edit: typo
You shouldn’t trust me just because I said something, yes.
You should understand what’s being said yourself so it doesn’t matter who is saying it.
No that is not how expertise works. You cannot be an expert at everything: there’s not enough time for one and not everyone is even capable for two. In fact, most people are decidedly NOT capable of being experts about MOST things. If someone spends their life working in an area (not watching YouTube videos about it), their perspective in that area is BETTER and is more worthy of consideration. A consensus among experts prevents any one individual from taking advantage of a situation and is even more worthy of consideration.
The thing is, copying experts does not mean you understand the subject.
Lots of people think that just because they cite someone with more credentials than them, then that person must be correct. That’s not how the real world works and you’ll understand it more as you get older.
If you just trust people based on their credentials, then you’re treating science like a religion and shouldn’t be taken seriously by rational people. You do this because it’s easier than understanding the science yourself.
This means you will be taken seriously by average people since rationality is on the decline.
Lol shut up I have two kids, a PhD and almost 20 years experience running a university research lab BEFORE my current job.
You don’t have to understand that low dose fluoride is good for your teeth for it to be true. You don’t have to understand that vaccines improve community health, or that getting enough movement throughout the day is good for heart health, or that eclipses don’t cause electromagnetic anomalies for those things to be true either.
Planning to trust yourself more then experts in a field is naive to the point of being delusional. Especially if you’re thinking you can go read a paper or two and “understand” it enough to be an intellectual peer of someone who actually invested years of time. No matter who you are, even if you’re Einstein reincarnated, you’re not that smart.
You don’t have to listen blindly to every person, but listening to the consensus of people who know more than you isn’t religion, it’s a heuristic for making better decisions.
I cite them not because they’re going to be correct, but because all things considered they’re more likely to be able to draw the correct conclusions from the data than me or the person I’m talking to.
I thought trekkies were supposed to be smart =/
I bet that guy is still mad that they broadcast a white guy kissing a black woman on television.
Smart enough not to treat science like a religion.
Listening to experts isn’t treating it like a religion you dolt.
Are the experts ever wrong?
Yes, but orders of magnitude less often than random members of the public “doing their own research”. And looking at the consensus of the experts rather than individual experts the error rate is further orders of magnitude below that. You need to let go of the idea that information being a good basis for decisions means that it’s “absolute truth”, because only religion has that; what we have is some sources of information that are less likely to be wrong than all the others, and that’s unfortunately the best you can get.
I don’t think it’s fair to flatly posit that since the CDC has been wrong at some point in the past, they can’t ever be trusted. While i understand the concept of don’t blindly follow words regardless of who said it, the sheer amount of research and dedication from an organization such as the CDC should count quite a bit more than the folks who have done none.
I don’t have the means to do such research, and as such i will more heavily weigh the words of the applicable research team than i will the words of someone who has no knowledge on the topic.
I think the question really should be not “have they ever been wrong,” but instead, “do i think they’re wrong on purpose.” A lot of research teams are funded by one side of an argument, which is cause for concern. The CDC is most likely not, and it would be fair to say they could be wrong, but likely not on purpose. Therefore i would say in this instance they are the more qualified experts who are also trying their best to be objective, and therefore, they likely have the more reasonable statement on this topic.