a semi-regular column of Truths, Half Truths, and Mostly Truths by Semi.
Volume I, Issue 19 · posted Sept. 5, 2001
The first thing you must understand is this: I have always had excellent teeth.
Whether that was due to the presence of fluoride in my drinking water (see below), heredity, or the fact that, when I was no more than six years old, I took a wrong turn in my dentist's office and witnessed a grown man writhing in pain while having his teeth drilled, I have taken a certain pride in the condition of my teeth. Other than having my lower wisdom teeth pulled when I was nineteen, I've never had any dental surgery, not even a filling.
Which is why, perhaps, it took me so long to realize that there was something monstrously wrong happening in my mouth.
I have been prone to sinus infections lately, especially on the left side, and that is to what I had attributed the throbbing in my head. A recent CAT scan had shown me how close the bottom of my nasal cavity is to the top of my teeth. All the usual treatments did not make the pain go away, however; it just got worse. Becoming suspicious, I called a few local dentists to see if any of them were taking new patients, but none of those I spoke to were.
Finally, one morning two weeks ago, I awoke in tremendous pain and stumbled into the Dental Clinic at the hospital where I work. "I don't have an appointment," I announced (actually, it was probably something more like "a oan aa ah a oi enn..."), "but I am an employee and I really need to see a dentist" ("buh ah aa ah ah e poyee ah a ei eee ooo eee a eh eh...").
In a surprisingly short amount of time, I was being x-rayed. The results confirmed my worst fears: an upper wisdom tooth had steadily impacted my back molar, bifurcating it and creating a huge cavity. Shortly after that, I was supine in a dentist's chair while a young dental intern (a dentern? residentist?) pronounced the tooth "unrecoverable". She stuck something in my mouth that I thought at first was a probe or a mirror so she could have a closer look, but the sudden and profound pain made me realize that she was shooting me with Novocain®. I gripped the arms of the chair and mentally flashed back to that tortuous scene when I was six years old. After the entire left side of my head had gone numb, she took a closer look at the x-ray and said "I'm sorry, I had the negative upside down and got the wrong side. I'm going to have to numb your right side now..."
Reaching down into the center of my soul, I found a cool and placid spot and calmly screamed at her "Ooh, itz iss ide! Iss ide urtz...!" ("No, it's this side. This side hurts.")
"Are you sure?" she asked reassuringly (me: "Esssssss...!"). Then slowly, methodically, agonizingly, she proceeded to rip the impacted tooth out of my skull. "You have strong bones," she pronounced at one point while she stopped to wipe the sweat from her brow and the blood and spit from her wrench.
Fortunately, after several minutes I had the good sense to pass out from the pain. When the world eventually came back into focus, I was greeted with the smiling face of a medical aide stupidly asking "are you all right?" ("Why yes, I'm just fine, except for the hole in the side of my face large enough to store valuables and the pool of blood welling in my mouth. I'll just be on my way as soon as I can manage to pry my fingers from the arm rest here...")
Wayyyy back in my first semi-regular issue ("This Modern Life"), I marveled at the technological advances that we often take for granted. There is another, less talked about, side to this overload of wonder: a certain unspoken impatience for the future to hurry up and get here already! After all, this is the 21st century. Why are we still correcting dental problems by doping people up with painkillers and wrenching their teeth out with glorified pliers? Why couldn't my dentist simply carve out my damaged section with a laser, repair it with nanobots, or simply clone me a new one?
Wasn't fluoridation supposed to be the answer to all our ills?
what do you think? email me
The earliest political campaign in which I can recall being involved was in my home town in California, circa 1970, and a fight to add fluoride to the municipal water supply. My parents were very pro-fluoridation; the medical evidence of the time indicated that there would be extensive health benefits for the young. Sure, there were naysayers, but their arguments seem to be based on fear and some wild notions of having their civil rights trampled.
I was nine or ten years old and excited to be out with my Dad, spreading posters and hanging up signs. For an impressionable young man, this was Democracy at its best.
I have a very distinct memory of hanging out in the campaign headquarters, which I think now was just a trailer parked in an empty field, and "helping" to keep track of where signs had been posted by sticking push-pins into a map of our town. Also, when the adults weren't looking, I kept sauntering over to the coffee table and popping down sugar cubes.
(Yes, I was aware even at the time of the irony inherent in sucking down sugar while fighting for dental health. It's a wonder my teeth survived the fluoridation campaign!)
I was absolutely thrilled when the public referendum passed. I liked being part of a winning team!
On the day that the fluoride was scheduled to be added to the water supply, a number of hysterical people called the local newspaper to complain about the taste of the water. What no one knew then was that the fluoride had not actually been added yet. This just confirmed for me what I had suspected all along, that the good citizens who opposed the fluoride were just a bunch of ill-informed cranks.
Three decades later, fluoridation is widespread and, when considered at all, is generally thought of as a benign improvement. According to the American Dental Association Fluoridation Facts webpage:
"Fluoridation is considered beneficial by the overwhelming majority of the health and scientific communities as well as the general public. Fluoridation is a community health measure that benefits children and adults. All ground and surface water in the U.S. contains some naturally occurring fluoride. If a community's water supply is fluoride-deficient (less than 0.7 parts fluoride per million parts water) fluoridation simply adjusts the fluoride's natural level, bringing it to the level recommended for decay prevention (0.7-1.2 parts per million)."
However, questions regarding the health benefits of fluoridation have not subsided. A quick search of Google.com (my personal favorite search engine) under the category Society > Issues > Health and Safety > Water Treatment > Fluoridation turns up over 70 websites, many of them devoted to combating fluoridation, with such startling names as NoFluoride.com, The Fluoride Action Network, and Fluoride Free.
According to reports culled from these and other sources:
Have you read the fine print on a tube of toothpaste recently? Mine contains the following FDA advisory: "Keep out of the reach of children under 6 years of age. If you accidentally swallow more than used for brushing, seek professional help or contact a poison control center immediately." Mind you, this on a bottle of children's toothpaste. Yikes!
What happened? Wasn't opposition to fluoride once just the domain of far-right conspiracy buffs? Remember Sterling Hayden as General Jack D. Ripper in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove:
"Do you realize that in addition to fluoridating water, there are studies underway to fluoridate salt, flour, fruit juices, soup, sugar, milk... ice cream, children's ice cream! You know when fluoridation first began? Nineteen hundred and forty-six. How does that coincide with your post-war Commie conspiracy, huh? It's incredibly obvious isn't it. A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual. Certainly without any choice. That's the way your hard-core Commie works..."
(transcription from Michael Hacker's Dr. Strangelove Quote Gallery)
As an older and more thoughtful person, I now realize that those "wild notions of having their civil rights trampled" is a little thing that legal scholars and medical ethicists refer to as "informed consent", in this case the right not to be forced to ingest something that you don't want. Let's look at some history...
Fluoride is a toxic compound that originally was sold as an insect and rat poison; it is derived from hydrofluosilicic acid, a waste by-product of heavy industries such as steel and aluminum factories, coal-burning power plants, the manufacture of phosphate fertilizer, and in the production of glass and cement. Historically, these industries have avoided the cost of disposing of this material by selling the fluoride to municipalities. According to a 1999 article by Mark Hertsgaard and Phillip Frazer at Salon.com:
"The fluoride disposal problem arose during World War II, when demand for war materials meant increased production of aluminum, steel and other fluoride-related products. At the end of the war, with massive amounts of fluoride waste needing disposal, the Public Health Service began pushing to add fluoride to the water in Grand Rapids, Mich., and dozens of other U.S. cities. At the time, the Public Health Service was being run by Treasury Secretary Andrew W. Mellon, a founder and major stockholder of the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa), which had dominated fluoride research since the 1920s. By 1950, as the fluoridation campaign gained steam, the Public Health Service was headed by another top Alcoa official, Oscar R. Ewing, who in turn was aided by Edward L. Bernays, the father of modern public relations and author of the book 'Propaganda', who sought to portray fluoride's opponents as 'wackos'."
So, if fluoridation is a conspiracy, it appears to have been launched not by commie, leftist pinkoes, but by the Cold War Military-Industrial Complex in the service of heavy waste disposal while we liberals, uh ... carried their water.
what do you think? email me
What's the lesson to be learned here?
Well first, despite what you may infer, I think it is A Very Good Thing to get our children involved in important political issues. Politics at its best is about doing the right thing and improving our society. My family has been politically active much further back than I can remember; we read the newspaper and discussed important issues of the day. With voter turnout continuing downward, I think it's important to impress upon the next generation the importance of political participation. For as we all learned the hard way last November, every voice counts and just one vote can make a difference.* *(One Justice of the Supreme Court vote, of course...)
Despite the confusion it may cause, this is something that I really appreciate about the internet — the increased forums we now have for talking to other people and the additional resources at our fingertips for researching and utilizing massive chunks of misinformation.
So is fluoridation a medical breakthrough and the result of a progressive grassroots action, or a Cold War-era conspiracy to aid the Military-Industrial complex in profitably dumping a toxic waste upon an ignorant citizenry?
I really have no idea. That's the beautiful and the horrible thing about the internet; we can find plenty of grist to support either side of almost any issue. Me, I figure that the reality lies somewhere between the two extremes.
Or, to borrow a phrase, "the semi-truth is out there..."
what do you think? email me
Here's another reason why I love the World Wide Web...
While soliciting input for ReagansBrain.com, a correspondent brought the Ronald Reagan - The Bonzo President website [http://quickchange.com/reagan/] to my attention.
(Let me pause here for a moment and say: Yes, I know, making fun of Reagan is a little, well ... old. To paraphrase Steve Martin "it's like making Ike jokes..." That having been said, with all the attempts by groups like The Ronald Reagan Legacy Project to rewrite the history of The Reagan Error, I think it is instructive to look back at those days and remember another president who suffered, as one scribe put it, "Encyclopedic Ignorance").
The beauty of the site is that it presents simple particulars from the Reagan presidency in chronological order and lets the damning facts speak for themselves. Just to show an example nearly at random, here are some of the entries for a six-week period from February to April 1982:
2/9/82
George Bush denies that he ever used the phrase "voodoo economics" and
challenges "anybody to find it." NBC's Ken Bode promptly broadcasts
the 1980 tape.
3/1/82
Sen. Bob Packwood (R-OR) claims President Reagan frequently offers up transparent
fictional anecdotes as if they were real. "We've got a $120 billion deficit
coming," says Packwood, "and the President says, 'You know, a young
man went into a grocery store and he had an orange in one hand and a bottle of
vodka in the other, and he paid for the orange with food stamps and he took the
change and paid for the vodka. That's what's wrong.' And we just shake our
heads." (see 3/24/82)
3/24/82
Agriculture official Mary C. Jarratt tells Congress her department has been
unable to document President Reagan's stories of food stamp abuse, pointing out
that the change from a food stamp purchase is limited to 99 cents. "It's
not possible to buy a bottle of vodka with 99 cents" she says. Deputy White
House press secretary Peter Roussel says Reagan wouldn't tell those stories
"unless he thought they were accurate." (see 4/15/92)
4/15/82
"In England, if a criminal carried a gun, even though he didn't use it,
he was not tried for burglary or theft or whatever he was doing. He was tried
for first degree murder and hung if he was found guilty" - President Reagan
citing a favorite example of British law. (see 4/16/82)
4/16/82
"Well, it's a good story, though. It made the point, didn't it?" -
White House spokesman Larry Speakes on being informed that President Reagan's
story about British gun law is "just not true."
I wrote the author a message complimenting him on his site and received a very nice note back signed "Russell 'Hitman' Alexander". That name sounded awfully familiar, so I followed a link in his signature to another website, hitmanbluesband.com.
"Sherman, to the wayback machine..."
It's 1988. After a few false starts in uptown Manhattan, I've settled into
my new job near Union Square. I work with a bunch of East-
Well, anyway, I did for awhile, until I figured out that I really didn't enjoy the smell of all that smoke and alcohol and other unidentifiable substances (okay, so I really am a square). Still, I enjoyed the music, and I remember seeing this cool cat who could stroke a guitar like nobody's business, and he had a great blues moniker that I would never forget: "Hitman".
Sure enough, thirteen years later and here I am looking at his website and listening to audio files of his music. I ordered his CD "Blooztown" and have been listening to it all week. I like all the songs, but I particularly like "Ain't Nothin' Cooler Than The Blues", which ends with this memorable refrain:
There ain't nothing cooler than the blues
There ain't nothing cooler than the blues
You can play anything you choose
Man, you can play a thrash metal gangsta rap hip hop cd101 neuvo jazz
alternative grunge r&b dance new country teenage anthem
But there ain't nothing cooler than the blues
If you like your Blues Chicago-style, then check out http://www.hitmanbluesband.com.
If you like reading about confused and incompetent Republican presidents ... well, pick up any major newspaper or cruise on over to http://quickchange.com/reagan/.
what do you think? email me
As usual, all definitions have been liberated from Dictionary.com. This week's words all have teeth...
cuspid\cus"pid\, n.; one of the canine teeth; -- so called from having but one point or cusp on the crown.
dog·tooth\dog"tooth\ n.; 1. a canine tooth; an eyetooth; 2. medieval ornament consisting of four leaflike projections radiating from a raised center.
eye·tooth\eye"tooth\ n.; a canine tooth of the upper jaw, perhaps so called from its location immediately below the eye.
intaglio\In*tagl"io\, n.; a cutting or engraving; a figure cut into something, as a gem, so as to make a design depressed below the surface of the material; hence, anything so carved or impressed, as a gem, matrix, etc.; -- opposed to cameo. Also used adjectively.
Finally, according to a word history usage note in The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition:"Eating, biting, teeth, and dentists are related
not only logically but etymologically; that is, the roots of the words eat,
tooth, and dentist have a common origin. The Proto-
"Now, I submit to you that I told the truth. I don't know whether he really ran over toward second base and made a one-hand stab or whether he just squatted down and took the ball when it came to him. But the truth got there and, in other words, it can be attractively packaged." — Ronald Reagan, reminiscing about his sports radio announcing days
SEMI TRUTHS is a semi-regular email newsletter dedicated to Political Analysis and Humor, Social Satire, and whatever else angers and amuses me. All issues, as well as subscription information, can be found at http://SemiTrue.com, or write semi@semitrue.com
All Contents (except the stuff I stole) Copyright © 2001 S.M.
McCord.
Redistribution allowed, provided you cite http://www.semitrue.com.