A Statement On Fluoridation

1. I believe that all freedom loving Americans should be opposed to fluoridation on the grounds that it is totalitarian medicine of the worst sort, in that this is the first time in the history of medicine that the size and age of the individual has been disregarded in the prescribing of a poison to be taken internally as a medicine.

2. Evidence is lacking that this is an effective way to reduce tooth decay in our children. A correct appraisal of the government’s published statistics reveals that there has been no real reduction in Newburgh and Grand Rapids as claimed.

3. It is physically impossible to deliver a water containing one part per million of fluorine to any large segment of the population, no matter how accurately it may have been adjusted at the intake. Chemists of the City of New York’s waterworks have analyzed water from many faucets of homes of some 20 cities, including those in which good results are claimed, and at no place was there uniformity of dose level, which ranged from zero to twice the recommended dose.

4. One part per million was selected arbitrarily as a level that would give the hardest teeth with the least amount of disfiguration. This has not been borne out by the results, and the statistical support given it has shown to be guilty of five mathematical errors in statistical analysis. It was known to those who made this arbitrary selection that there were towns in Colorado and elsewhere where every person who had spent their life in them was a victim of tooth disfigurement, and this one part per million is within the poisonous range.

5. Fluorine possesses stronger affinities for other chemicals than do other members of the halogen group. Fluorine drives out iodine and takes its place, thus producing goiter. This is one of the reasons why the Swiss Commission refused to adopt the “American experiment.” It also substitutes itself in the Krebs cycle forming mono-fluoro-acetate. The Krebs cycle is the series of chemical processes by which foods are burned in the body for energy and nourishment and this mono-fluoro-acetate is the poison developed by certain plants in South Africa which killed the cattle that ate them. Fluorine also definitely interferes with the alkaline phosphatase enzymes which have to do with the digestion of starches and the utilization of calcium.

6. There have been no long-term experiments where animals could live out their life span drinking one part per million of fluorine. No laboratory can conduct experiments which last over 120 days; the demands are too pressing. However, Clive McCay of Cornell University has been studying the processes of ageing and can allow his animals to live a complete life span. He has reported that in a large colony of animals drinking adequately controlled one part per million of fluorine the amount of inflammation of the gums (pyorrhea) was astoundingly large. He is not an amateur student of fluorine, but has studied it continually since his college days 35 years ago.

7. Therefore, I concur with the more than 700 distinguished physicians and dentists, many of whom are teachers in leading medical schools, that with the present state of knowledge, the addition of fluorine to the drinking water is not a safe procedure, and perhaps we should be trying to get fluorine out of the drinking water rather than trying to put it in. We know that the proper approach to prevention of tooth decay in the English speaking peoples is to get them to accept a proper diet.

 

(Signed)

Jonathan Forman, M.D.