Hanaba Munn Welch– Cavity-fighting fluoride caveats

If you’re a bubble gum-chewing kid and you’re very scared of the dentist (with reason) and drinking water with fluoride can keep you from getting cavities, you vote for fluoride.
Except kids can’t vote.
Yep, from age six through adolescence. I lived in fear of getting cavities and got them anyway.
Treated water was something of a non-issue for me personally. We lived in the country and drank well water. But fluoridation was in the news, and my parents watched the news, and I watched what they watched. I remember one guy emphatically saying fluoride was rat poison.
Rat poison? Really? That got my attention. The county agent, Mr. Wendt, had shown color slides at a monthly Farm Bureau meeting on the benefits of poisoning rats. Incidentally, he was famous for saying “That one’s upside down-ards” when a slide happened to be upside down-ards. Never mind that his wife taught English.
Monthly Farm Bureau meetings drew farm families to town. Seems like meetings were on Monday nights. So was “I Love Lucy.” As soon as television took hold, those meetings faded away. And there you have it. I was left mainly with the rat poison memory.
Regarding fluoride, I marveled that rat poison could prevent cavities. From the sideline I watched controversial fluoride prevail and get put into water systems. (In retrospect, who was making money selling fluoride? Was anybody really that concerned about all our teeth?) Me, the well water kid, I got my fluoride from Crest and still got cavities.
By the way, Mr. Wendt didn’t mention fluoride. He promoted warfarin. Indeed, it’s the active ingredient in the rat poison we now use at the farm. The price has risen since 1953, but it works. Good old warfarin.
When my daddy started taking warfarin as blood thinner, I was somewhat taken aback. Warfarin? The rat poison? Sure enough. I guess that was my first lesson in the double uses of certain compounds.
Later, in the same vein, my job at the mental hospital coincided with my stint at raising sheep. Phenothiazine was sheep wormer that came in tubes that looked like caulk. We administered the phenothiazine paste to our sheep regularly with something like a caulk gun that clicked. Two clicks per ewe.
So there I sat at my day job hearing about some of our patients taking the tranquilizing medication phenothiazine. What?
Sure enough, it turned out to be the same stuff! When I researched how it works for sheep, I learned that it’s the worms that are affected. Once tranquilized, they let go their parasitic grip on the sheep’s intestines and get expelled. In my mind I see a vivid cartoonish picture of that phenomenon, despite no confirmation from AI.
Back to fluoride. Now that I’m paying for crowns instead of fillings, I’m feeling bullet-proof and anti-fluoride.
Fluoride proponents say fluoride in the water helps the masses maintain strong teeth.
If that market for fluoride ever goes away, look out rats!