Dentists you can trust?

Credit: Making Sense of Fluoride Facebook page.

Looks like the Fluoride Free Hamilton activists have managed to find 3 dentists who they agree with. None of them work in Hamilton – one is from Northland, one from Wellington and the other is from Dunedin. So they literally searched far and wide to locate them.

Never mind, Fluoride Free Hamilton and its network is trusted by the Hamilton City Council when it comes to health matters. So they can continue to ignore the advice from local and national health experts. However, it might be harder for the incoming council to ignore the advice coming from voters during the upcoming local body elections and fluoridation referendum in the city.

The activist’s claim that their 3 dentists are the informed ones carries the implication that all other New Zealand dentists are uninformed! In fact Grant et al (2013) survey New Zealand dentists on the opinions of fluoridation (see New Zealand dentists’ views on community water fluoridation). Their finding were that:

“Most practitioners (93.5%) reported supporting community water fluoridation; the other 6.5% either were unsure or did not support it. Higher proportions of more recent graduates supported CWF. Some 85.6% of practitioners thought that drinking fluoridated water was a harmless way to prevent dental caries, but 6.2% felt that fluoridated water may cause other health problems.”

And they concluded:

“Most New Zealand dental practitioners support community water fluoridation, although a very small proportion believe that it is harmful and/or does not prevent caries.”

The fluoridation issue is turning out like the controversy around scientific issues like climate change and biological evolution. Just as scientists supporting creationism or climate change denial turn out to be a very small fraction of the numbers on those fields, dentists opposing community water fluoridation are also a very small fraction of all dentists.

Mind you – Fluoride Free Hamilton seems to be making a virtue out of that embarrassingly small support for their views. I am expecting to hear them come out with the Galileo Gambit some time soon.

Thanks to Dan from Making Sense of Fluoride for bringing my attention to the paper.

See also:

Similar articles on fluoridation
Making sense of fluoride Facebook page
New Zealanders for fluoridation Facebook page