The Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday announced it will begin the process of pulling prescription fluoride drops and tablets for children off the market. The supplements are usually given to kids at high risk for cavities.
The federal government and some state legislatures are increasingly drawing attention to what they claim are the risks associated with fluoride, a mineral that’s been used for decades in community water systems, toothpastes and mouth rinses to prevent tooth decay.
Dentists fiercely contest the notion that the harms of fluoride outweigh the benefits.
This is even more nuts than removing fluoride from municipal water systems. At least with that, parents who believe the science that their kids’ teeth will be better off with targeted fluoride treatment can buy the drops and tablets, and those who are afraid for some reason can choose to just not use it.
This is just trying to ban access to fluoride entirely, despite research showing its benefits and the distinct lack of significant harm. Madness.
What next, are they going to criminalize sending fluoride drops/pills through the mail, like mifepristone?
Calgary, AB Canada removed fluoride and a decade later added it back after seeing the effects of its absence.
This is just trying to ban access to fluoride entirely
Well yeah. These are extremists, absolutists, radicals. Their dogma must be simple and without exceptions. If they admit even one scenario where fluoride has more benefits than deficits, their whole ideology and worldview crumbles. Nuance is an existential threat.
Narcissism as a fascist dictatorship of a whole country.
The mechanisms of narcissism and of cults are remarkably similar.
They just banned it in Florida, with Meatball DeSatan calling it “forced medication,” and that if parents want their kids to have fluoride, they can give it to them. Now they want to ban those products, too.
So now we’re just going to reconfigure our entire society to indulge the fantasies of conspiracy theory weirdos?
So now we’re just going to reconfigure our entire society to indulge the fantasies of conspiracy theory weirdos?
Until Americans get off their couch and do something, yes.
I kinda buy the “forced medication” argument, but rather than removing the municipal water requirement, I think the municipality should provide water filters for those that want to opt-out.
I think the evidence is fairly clear that, in this case, opt-in should be the default as it protects VASTLY more than it harms.
Nah, I’m perfectly ok with “forced medication” when the societal benefit vastly outweighs the side effects. Mandatory vaccination, nutritionally supplemented food for children to aid in development, minor things like fluoride that reduce healthcare costs and promote long-term health, bring it on.
Giving credence to unsupported “skepticism” undermines the necessary faith in public infrastructure. Faith is a careful word choice here. I don’t expect the average person to really understand the benefits and chemistry and p-values, as much as I’d like them to. Some things just need doing because you trust the authority saying so. (And right now there are precious few American authorities worthy of trust.)
I can’t agree. Bodily autonomy isn’t a compromise position for me, and I think “faith” is a vice, not a virtue.
It’s not a compromise it’s the cost of a functioning society. Measles. Smallpox. Polio. Whooping cough. There are extremely real costs to “personal choice” in the face of disease. Those costs are quite often passed on to children. Rickets. Fetal alcohol syndrome. I don’t think parents should be free to make harmful choices for their offspring.
Faith is the compromise. I wish that every single adult had the education, interest, and wherewithal to make ethical and well-informed decisions about themself and their dependents but that’s not the world we live in.
Bodily autonomy doesn’t allow parents to make choices for children. It does allow people to make choices for themselves. Nice try at shifting those goalposts, tho.
The context of this thread is healthcare for children.
No reason to reconfigure anything. They have droves of people willingly agreeing to and gobbling this shit up. Our society is fundamentally broken
You could make a great movie about the fluoride prohibition of the 2020s.
[Opening shot: A dark, rain-slicked cityscape. Neon signs flicker. A child’s toothbrush lies abandoned in a puddle.]
Narrator (gravelly voice): In a world where fluoride is forbidden…
[Cut to a sleek black SUV speeding through a checkpoint. Inside, a woman in a lab coat loads a capsule into a hidden compartment behind a false toothpaste tube.]
Narrator: …one syndicate dares to keep the smiles alive.
[Cue dramatic music. A warehouse door slams open. Inside: crates of fluoride tablets, glowing faintly blue. Armed guards in dental scrubs patrol the perimeter.]
Agent Plaque (sternly): “They’re dosing kids in back-alley clinics. We need to shut them down—permanently.”
[Montage: high-speed chases through suburban cul-de-sacs, a drone crashing into a jungle gym, a slow-motion shot of a fluoride pill flying through the air and landing in a glass of water.]
The Molar (smirking): “You can take the fluoride out of the pharmacies… but you can’t take the sparkle out of the people.”
[Cue epic music drop. Explosions. A toothbrush sword fight. A child grinning with unnaturally white teeth.]
Narrator: This summer… the fight for dental freedom begins.
FLUORIDE WARS: THE SPARKLE SYNDICATE
Coming soon to a theater near you. Brush responsibly.
RFK Jr. strikes again. I’ll never understand why people like him can’t grasp the idea that the difference between medicine and poison is often dosage.
The amount of fluoride in these tablets is nowhere near unsafe levels. It’s not even close.
He literally doesn’t believe in germ theory.
And I don’t mean ‘literally’ as in ‘figuratively’. He genuinely doesn’t believe in the most basic element of modern health and medicine.
You can’t expect him to then grasp something as nuanced as dosage.
Dude took his grandkids swimming in a sewage infested waterway… I mean, you expect someone like that to have even the loosest grasp of anything resembling nuance?
I really hope an amoeba finishes what the worm started.
That poor worm clearly starved to death
Water isn’t warm enough for them yet
Because understanding that would mean his heroin addiction was his own fault, not the heroin’s fault.
This is such a fundamental change to get used to - some branches of government have been a meritocracy my entire life, doing their best to do the right thing, being careful to heed the best scientific advice, that my immediate reaction is to trust them. Then I remember we’re living in a time where the only qualification is personal loyalty and this particular circus is run by a clown
To be fair, the FDA was incompetent / hamstrung in many other areas before. The overriding purpose was to increase profit.
They, at least they are trying something new :D
So much for parents doing research and deciding if it’s right for them. Yet another bad faith argument.
Next up: vitamin c tablets. We won’t stop until scurvy is in full come back!
Someone here recently said RFK is literally just Pestilence incarnate, and I don’t think they are wrong. The dude is the Randall Flagg of diseases. Just waiting for his actual bugchaser arc. Then he’ll plan a mass gathering and dissolve like Gravemind into deadly spores.
I bet C will stay forever because some successful marketing campaign convinced people it’s a natural remedy against all types of colds and flu, despite being worthless for that cause. Science ain’t got nothing on a good commercial.
if you have basically any access to fresh food you don’t need to take vitamin C, even half a small potato will give you an entire days worth of of vitamin C and anything more than that will be peed out anyway. Unless you ban all fresh food people will be getting enough vitamin C, this isn’t a 1600s pirate ship, no one needs to supplement it, the supplements are a pure cash grab
I don’t know. You can’t overdose on Vitamin C. Rubes don’t like a cure-all unless it’s really bad for you. Vitamin A is the new panacea.
You can overdose on Vitamin C, it just takes way more than for fat soluble vitamins and minerals (also not usually fatal). Two 500mg tablets per day has shown a strong increase in long term kidney stone formation. One whole bottle (10g) in a day is “almost certain severe diarrhea within hours; transient hyper-oxaluria, especially risky for people with renal issues. “
Thanks! I did not know that.
I am gonna be so pissed if that worm-infested moron effects my skin care regimen. Vit C and Vit A are very big for me.
Also I don’t wanna pay more for it because people started to freakin EAT skin serums…
Vitamin C supplements are mostly bullshit anyway. Almost nobody needs them.
I would’ve been so cooked. This will also just harm any neurodivergent kid with executive disfunction. That plus the autism registry shows a clear attack on neurodivergents.
Same! We moved to a place with well water when I was ~5 and my parents made me use the fluoride rinse
I hated it bc it was like an extra step, but I was literally the only kid in my school to never have cavities even though I would try to skip brushing all the time. And yeah you called it with the executive dysfunction, but didn’t find out I had ADHD until I was an adult
I grew up on well water. I still have well water as an adult. Finally swapping to a prescription grade flouride toothpaste is the only thing that has gotten my cavities in check. It’s been a struggle my entire life.
Brushing twice a day did not matter. No sweets did not matter. I have basically no candy or sweet drink habits at all.
I can directly attribute my lifetime of cavity problems to non flourinated water. My dentist agrees.
This is going to wreck America’s health.
They’re weeding out the “untermensch.” The non-hetero, the mentally and physically disabled, the undesireable ethnicities, the criminals.
This reminds me of Swish. Did anyone else have Swish growing up?
It was this program and I think they did it because like the entire community was on well water. Once a month they came into our school and had us rinse our mouths with this really high fluoride mouthwash. We had to swish it for like 2 whole minutes or something that seemed like a long time as a child.
It was probably the only thing that saved my teeth growing up (neglectful parents).
We had this fluoride foam the dentist put on twice annually. Fruit-flavored foam, suctioned it back off, no rinse, and you couldn’t eat or drink for 30 minutes. Got that for a good number of years. I also recall that due to the combination of that, your city’s fluoridated water, and toothpaste, you could get these faint white spots in the middle of your teeth.
We did fluoride treatments but only at semi-annual dental checkups. It was a thick gel that they put in trays and we had to keep them in our mouths for a couple minutes. You had to lean over a sink and let any saliva just drip out because you weren’t supposed to swallow any of it.
But I also was trained from an early age to brush with fluoride toothpaste every night before bed, so…
I remember doing this. Sometimes the flavor was good, other times it was sooo nasty. Didn’t matter, had to keep swishing
Yes! The hit-or-miss flavor was terrible.
So - this started as a John Bircher thing right?
I’ve just been befuddled at the purpose and the point of this conspiracy theory. I guess Alex Jones’s dad is a dentist (and a Bircher) but I doubt that dentists conspire for us to have bad teeth.
Just generic “I don’t like the gubmit”? Was it a Jewish person who suggested that we improve dental health on a population level? What’s the initial bit of skin or hair that this stupid booger coalesced around?
I guess these weirdos have always been around. We just didn’t put them in charge of health.
I doubt that dentists conspire for us to have bad teeth.
People with bad teeth is literally their main revenue stream?! I wouldn’t put it past them.
Cool, then regulate sugar in industrial food and beverage.
Regulate it harshly these fuckers need to be sent to the gulag
Regulations?! In trump’s America?! No way. It costs too much for shareholders
Funny. We’re soon going to see how much shareholders like an environment without regulation… like a working SEC.
Let’s go all out and replace them with meth. Instead of protecting teeth, we’ll eliminate them. Who needs a dentist when you have no teeth? Think of the savings!
Lisa needs braces.
Nice try, Big Soup! Paying a lot for medical treatment is the American Dream!
Haha! I’m actually from Big Stew, you fool. And I run a side gig with Big Applesauce.
You can’t eat stew without teeth!
They try to make Americans weak, sick, and dead on all fronts. As of the US government was under control of a hostile country.
If Trump is a Russian sabatour he’s doing a fantastic job.
Don’t forget stupider
Time to stock up on fluoride I guess….
I beat the rush and stocked up in December, and I hate that that purchase is already feeling justified. One option to keep in mind as well is that tea is relatively good natural source of fluoride. So if things get bad enough, becoming an unsweetened tea-drinker might help.
Its weird hearing americans have to specify ‘un-sweetened’ tea as if its not the norm
Yeah, I agree it’s weird. As an American who grew up in an area where sweetened tea wasn’t the norm, I hate having to specify. But I also don’t have any faith left in my fellow countrymen, and feel like I have to make it clear for them.
I don’t order tea often, but we would also have to specify if we want it hot. I guess I always thought of the options as sweet/unsweet iced tea, or probably nothing because I’d be surprised if they have some earl grey back there.
Is there actually a need to? Does ingested fluoride do anything that toothpaste fluoride doesn’t do?
great. next it will be banned in toothpaste and mouth rinses.
if you visit any of the reviews of FLOURIDE-free toothpaste, you can tell at least some of them have reported cavaties.
I once tried brushing my teeth with baking soda instead of toothpaste for a few weeks. From what I understand, they have about the same level of abrasiveness, so they should be about as good at scrubbing the gunk out of your teeth. The key difference is that toothpaste has fluoride in it. After a while I started having pain/irritation in my mouth and gums. It went away when I went back to toothpaste. So if anyone was looking for anecdotal evidence of fluoride being good for your teeth, there you go.
I brush with Nano-hydroxyapitite for like 3 weeks and then do flouride for a couple weeks. I don’t think results happen that quickly.
which ones do you use? i originally had the OG nudge 10% but it causes chelitis so i stopped, i bought a different brand, i havnt used it yet. all 10%, and there were reports on some of these nHA have very sketchy concentration of nHa IN THEM. I MOSTLY use the ones with potassium nitrate, it helps with sensitivity.
X-Pur Remin. Its expensive but at least its tested and not sketchy. You have to be careful they are using a medical grade because the rod shaped stuff is apparently not tested for safety and is likely harmful when ingested.
i used toothpaste with potassium nitrate and flouride thats useful for sensitivity, just gotta find the right one.
BAKING soda is pretty abrasive, according to the dental sub, the grain size is usually coarse, so it wears down yuor enamel. i used some whitening toothpaste that uses a combination of baking soda, hydrated silica, and hydrogen peroxide, i stopped after it i learned it damages the teeth, but also it was causing severe gum irritation and ulcers, and gave me angular chelitis.
Silk Road for fluoride, got it.
