The bitch about scientific studies is you can’t find what you don’t know to look for. That has to be part of the trade off calculus when deciding what substances to introduce to our internal environment.
> The bitch about scientific studies is you can’t find what you don’t know to look for.
This is only true if you assume that all effects are too small to notice. If you run an experiment on adding fluoride to water, declare an interest in enamel thickness, and then observe that 30% of the experimental group died within six months, you just made a finding that you didn't know you should have been looking for.
Okay? You can still come up with a correlation between net fluoride mass of bones and teeth and negative health traits or outcomes. You can also compare occupational exposure against normal exposure, no drinking water exposure (lived life in country without this policy), etc. There are many different types of scientific studies.
I am much less confident than you appear to be that we are able to detect a significant percentage of negative health traits.
Let’s say that hypothetically there is a 3rd order effect on the excretion pattern of some neurotransmitter. Can we detect that? Could it negatively affect mood regulation? There are a million things like that.
I guess the question is why your priors are so far weighted to the side of negative outcomes. If we're talking about yet undiscovered effects of something it seems equally plausible for those effects to be positive. Aspirin is a pretty good example of this where we keep discovering more positive effects. And I can understand somewhat the bias toward the state of nature but there's lots of examples where our deviations were positive, the biggest one being the cognitive effects of cooking food.
> If we're talking about yet undiscovered effects of something it seems equally plausible for those effects to be positive.
Where do you get this from? If you ingest a random chemical (or imagine licking random objects...), do you really expect the chances of it being beneficial vs. detrimental to your health to be remotely close to 50/50?
> The fractional retention or balance of fluoride at any age depends on the quantitative features of absorption and excretion. For healthy, young, or middle-aged adults, approximately 50 percent of absorbed fluoride is retained by uptake in calcified tissues, and 50 percent is excreted in the urine. For young children, as much as 80 percent can be retained owing to increased uptake by the developing skeleton and teeth (Ekstrand et al., 1994a, b). Such data are not available for persons in the later years of life, but based on bone mineral dynamics, it is likely that the fraction excreted is greater than the fraction retained.
> .9 Radiographic detection of teeth and skeletal changes and microscopic examination of affected bone are helpful adjunct procedures for diagnosis.
> Histopathologic and radiographic examination of bones detects bone lesions and tentatively confirms osteofluorosis.14,26 Biopsy or rib or coccygeal vertebrae is used to obtain samples for skeletal fluoride analysis.23
> We have developed a localized noninvasive nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) method for determining the accumulated bone fluoride content in human index fingers
