Talk:Water fluoridation controversy

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This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Water fluoridation controversy article.
This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject.

Put new text under old text. Click here to start a new topic.
New to Wikipedia? Welcome! Learn to edit; get help.

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Find medical sources: Source guidelines · PubMed · Cochrane · DOAJ · Gale · OpenMD · ScienceDirect · Springer · Trip · Wiley · TWL

Archives: Index, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6: 3 months

A summary of this article appears in Water fluoridation.

This page is not a forum for general discussion about editors' beliefs about fluoridation. Any such comments may be removed or refactored. Please limit discussion to improvement of this article. You may wish to ask factual questions about editors' beliefs about fluoridation at the Reference desk.

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The subject of this article is controversial and content may be in dispute. When updating the article, be bold, but not reckless. Feel free to try to improve the article, but don't take it personally if your changes are reversed; instead, come here to the talk page to discuss them. Content must be written from a neutral point of view. Include citations when adding content and consider tagging or removing unsourced information.

Fluoride Alert Network (FAN) embodies the controversy and banning it is form of censorship.

Shame on Wikipedia for being taken over by the thought control police! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jfb102455 (talk • contribs)

FluorideAlert was added to the spam blacklist in 2010, because links to it were being repeatedly spammed by an aggressive sockpuppeteer: [1]. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 18:31, 21 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

About FAN: it is literally a Mom and Pop organization, being run by a undistinguished (largely unpublished) and undecorated (zero national awards) professor retired from a tiny college together with his son and his wife. Contrast those characteristics with groups that are guided, not by family, but by decorated professors and professionals from major organizations. Even FANs main journal is not recognized by PubMed. --Smokefoot (talk) 19:00, 21 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

That is not in the sprite of Wikipedia. They embody the meaning of this article. You ar make an unjustified value judgement that reduced the value of truth on wikipedia. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.207.158.78 (talk) 00:28, 22 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that Wikipedia is being taken over by censorship. Probably by those with vested interest.

The heading of this article is evidently pro-fluoridation. it is not written in an exploratory tone at all.

Does anyone know if it is possible to stop self righteous characters from censoring the page?

Haaaa (talk) 04:48, 30 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I see no evidence of censorship. Just standards of evidence. -- Scray (talk) 05:30, 30 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, excluding what is clearly fringe content is not censorship. HiLo48 (talk) 07:36, 30 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

It is clearly not fringe it is well cited and thought out, and there is no good response to the list of 50 reasons against fluoridation the site provides. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 50.13.53.93 (talk) 06:48, 20 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

It is fringe, since it is totally ignored by scientists and the media. It's trivial for any scholar to write a well-cited fringe article. We rely on secondary sources to judge when something is significant. TippyGoomba (talk) 16:56, 20 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

What you are describing is not representative of the website in question. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 50.13.53.93 (talk) 18:10, 24 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

This article should be about the of the beliefs inherent in conspiracy and not about if they are true or false.

This article should be about the beliefs of the conspiracy not whether those beliefs are true of false. This article fall far short of that goal. It is totally dominated by pro fluoride editors who have not posted the full story. This is wikipedia at its worst. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.207.158.78 (talk) 00:59, 22 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Not done! Edit requests must be of the form "Please change X to Y". TippyGoomba (talk) 01:05, 22 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Please change this article from propaganda to one that explores the very real dangers of fluoridation.

"In point of fact, fluoride causes more human cancer death, and causes it faster than any other chemical."--Dean Burk -- Congressional Record 21 July 1976 "They (ACS) lie like scoundrels."----Dean Burk, Ph.D., 34 years at the National Cancer Institute. — FLUORIDE "amounts to public murder on a grand scale" --Dean Burk — Preceding unsigned comment added by 50.13.53.93 (talk) 06:51, 20 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

If you read a few lines above, I said: Edit requests must be of the form "Please change X to Y". TippyGoomba (talk) 16:53, 20 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Lawrence, Kansas

In these edits is added a story about Lawrence, Kansas. The text added, and the reference, do not establish any direct link between fluoridation and the events described. Since this is only conjecture, does it belong in WP? -- Scray (talk) 22:03, 6 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Looks like another editor removed it. I agree that it's out of place here. TippyGoomba (talk) 02:47, 7 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Statements against

This section seems a bit sparse. Would it be possible to add stronger statements against please?

"I am opposed to fluoridation because of the overwhelming evidence that fluoridation is not only potentially harmful but has already caused considerable, well-documented harm." Albert Schatz, Ph.D., biochemistry, world-renowned discoverer of streptomycin (Oct., 1999)

"Recent, peer-reviewed toxicity data, when applied to EPA's standard method for controlling risks from toxic chemicals, require an immediate halt to the use of the nation's drinking water reservoirs as disposal sites for the toxic waste of the phosphate fertilizer industry." Dr. J. W. Hirzy, representing the 1,500 scientists and professionals at EPA Headquarter's Union — Preceding unsigned comment added by 184.78.20.231 (talk) 05:24, 4 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Citations needed to wp:MEDRS sources.LeadSongDog come howl! 20:28, 6 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

yes can someone help source these? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 184.78.20.231 (talk) 00:35, 7 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

You provided the quotes, where did you get them from? TippyGoomba (talk) 04:35, 7 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

any tips of sourcing quotes? seems like, since they are quotes they should not need to be wp:MEDRS or do they? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 184.78.20.231 (talk) 14:13, 8 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

You took them from here, they may as well have been fabricated outright. Including the opinions of random scientists/doctors would violate WP:WEIGHT. TippyGoomba (talk) 04:11, 9 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Edit request on 14 August 2013

This edit request has been answered. Set the |answered= or |ans= parameter to no to reactivate your request.

Please reference Linked Harvard Study and results of medicating water supplies with fluoride. http://users.physics.harvard.edu/~wilson/arsenic/references/Ars_Fluo_shanyin.pdf

172.242.247.144 (talk) 22:42, 14 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Not done The link you gave is primarily about Arsenic contamination with some parallel studies about fluoride contamination. The levels of fluoride studied in the link are above the levels used in water fluoridation, hence it isn't relevant. TippyGoomba (talk) 03:34, 15 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Other sources of fluoride

It seems relevant that other sources of fluoride be mentioned since one of the problems claimed to exist is accumulation of fluoride and the effect on the kidneys in filtering it from the blood. The other sources include beer, wine, juice, fruits, vegetables, grains, boiled foods, and other prepared foods.

from the USDA http://www.ars.usda.gov/SP2UserFiles/Place/12354500/Data/Fluoride/F02.pdf — Preceding unsigned comment added by 184.78.20.231 (talk) 14:57, 19 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Bad summaries

There are currently two sections which have this tag:

The best way to fix this is to use the actual sections from the linked "main" subarticles. I'll do that. If this doesn't work, we can revert and discuss. -- Brangifer (talk) 01:38, 8 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Done. -- Brangifer (talk) 02:28, 8 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

POV too strongly pushed in some sectios

Specifcally the primary sections on ethics/safety/etc. Ethics is an especially flagrant one. It contains only alleged ethics concerns, rather than reflecting the controversy. The article is about the different stances (the heart of a controversy) regarding fluroidation, and yet in Ethics especially, and in many other sections, only the anti-fluoridation perspective is shown. A seemingly tacked-on bit later on talks about "statements for fluoride" but it seems that it would be better to show the controversey in each aspect. I would recommend that the statements in ethics be shown from both persepctives. At the very least it should be balanced...though I'd argue Due Weight should kick in here too. This sort of separate but equal thing we've got going now with a small afterthought section for pro-fluoride doesn't help the reader understand the controversy. Reading the ethics section, one would take away that there are only ethical issues on the anti- side, and that the pro-side has no comment. That is not a controversy; it's a position statement. 76.238.186.96 (talk) 16:45, 8 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]