A check for the fluoridators

The question of fluoridating municipal water supplies came up before the congress of the Union of Municipalities at La Malbaie on July 3 last.

Jean-Louis Doucet, Q.C., deputy-minister for municipal affairs, made the observation that dentists themselves are not in agreement with regard to the beneficent properties commonly attributed to fluoridated water. He went on to say that certain doctors even claim that sodium fluoride in drinking water is the cause of certain sicknesses.

The deputy-minster recalled, also, that a judgement of the highest court of Ontario refused to recognize the right of the municipalities to put fluoride in the public water system. The same was true for the province of New Brunswick.

Let us note here, right off, that regardless of what the effects of fluoride might be on the human constitution good, bad or indifferent, this is not an affair that is any concern of municipal councils or water system officials; it pertains stricly to the domain of the doctor and the pharmacist. The doctor treats his patients individually and prescribes for each the medicine he judges appropriate for their condition. Then it is the pharmacist, and not an official of the water department, who furnishes each individual patient with the medicine called for by the prescription made out for him personally by the doctor. And the pharmacist takes the greatest pains to mix the proper ingredients in the correct proportions and to indicate clearly on the bottle or package the size and frequency of the doses, all according to the doctor's prescription. Only quacks, charlatans or those fanatic apostles of Socialism would be so foolhardy as to want to administer medicine wholesale to the community through the public water supply, completely disregarding the matter of dosage and permitting everyone to take it in whenever they open the tap for a drink of water.

Nor can you, logically, draw any parallel between putting chlorine in the water and mix- ing sodium fluoride with it. Chlorine purifies the water. But no one pretends that it gives the water any curative power. Fluoride, on the other hand, in no way purifies the water; it is added under the pretense that it will give some medical value to the water.

Now, if the purifying of the water supply is a function which pertains strictly to the water department, then the medicating of the water supply is a function which pertains, or should pertain, strictly to the medical profession, to the doctors whose job it is to prescribe medicine.

In other words, municipal authorities who put fluoride in the water should be prosecuted by the College of Physicians and Surgeons for the illegal practice of medicine.