Unlike all other water treatment processes, fluoridation does not treat the water itself, but the person consuming it. The Food & Drug Administration accepts that fluoride is a drug, not a nutrient, when used to prevent disease. By definition, therefore, fluoridating water is a form of mass medication. This is why most western European nations have rejected the practice — because, in their view, the public water supply is not an appropriate place to be adding drugs.

Fluoridation – or any practice that uses the public water supply as a vehicle to deliver medicine – violates medical ethics in several important ways:

It deprives the individual of his or her right to informed consent to medication.
It is approved and delivered by people without medical qualifications.
It is delivered to everyone regardless of age, health or nutritional status, without individual oversight by a doctor and without control of dose.
The safety and effectiveness of fluoridated water has never been demonstrated by randomized controlled trials–the gold standard study that is now generally required before a drug can enter the market.

No doctor can force a patient to take a particular medicine. As explained by the American Medical Association, the doctor must inform the patient of the medicine’s benefits, side effects, and alternatives and then allow the patient to decide whether to take the medicine or not. With water fluoridation, health boards, city councils, and state legislatures simply tell the individual that fluoridated water is good for them and then proceed to add it to their drinking water, irrespective of their consent. Fluoridation us allows government bodies the right to do to everyone what an individual doctor is prohibited from doing doing to anyone.

In modern pharmacology, it is well known that individuals respond very differently to the same dose of a given drug. Thus, the dose of a drug that is safe for person A, may be toxic for person B. This same pattern applies to fluoride as well, as some people in society are known to be particularly vulnerable to fluoride’s toxic effects. Nevertheless, water fluoridation is based on the premise that the same dose of a medicine can be good for everybody, irrespective of their age, health, and nutritional status. Adding fluoride to water thus forces it on everyone in the community, including:

bottle-fed babies (despite recommendations by many dental researchers that infants should not consume fluoridated water);
individuals with poor kidney function (despite their impaired ability to excrete fluoride and their heightened risk for fluoride-induced bone damage);
individuals with iodine deficiency (despite compelling research showing that they can suffer amplified neurological damage from low levels of fluoride exposure)
individuals with deficiencies of calcium, vitamin C, and/or vitamin D (despite the well-documented fact that fluoride’s toxic effects on bone tissue are amplified in these individuals);
individuals who drink large quantities of water, including athletes, manual laborers, and those with polydipsia.
There is no other drug on the market that is applied so recklessly.

There is a reason that society requires prescription drugs to be dispensed by a doctor or dentist: if there are unexpected side effects or the patient is particularly sensitive to the drug in question, the doctor overseeing the patient can intervene and correct the problem. There is no such oversight with water fluoridation. There is no systematic or comprehensive program to track the level of fluoride building up in people’s tissues, or to monitor for side effects that may be occurring (e.g., routine urine and blood tests do not measure fluoride). Doctors are not trained at medical school to recognize the side effects of fluoride (if anything they are taught there are none). Even when people are suffering from overt crippling forms of skeletal fluorosis (fluoride poisoning of the bone), it can take years of incorrect diagnoses and failed therapies to receive a correct diagnosis.

Although water departments can generally control the concentration of fluoride being added to water, they cannot control the dose that individuals receive. This is because the dose depends on two factors beyond the water department’s control: (a) the water drinker’s weight and (b) the water drinker’s thirst. The less an individual weighs, the greater the dose (by body weight) they will receive for each glass of water consumed, and the more an individual drinks (and some people, including athletes and manual laborers, drink a lot), the more fluoride they will receive.

The uncontrolled dose that water fluoridation delivers stands in stark contrast to prescription drugs. When a doctor prescribes a drug he or she always specifies the daily dose very carefully. Even in the same patient, the dose is subject to revision, depending on the patient’s response. No such individual tailoring occurs with water fluoridation.

Randomized controlled trials (RCT) are the gold standard for proving whether a drug is truly safe and effective and are thus typically require before a government licensing body will allow the drug to enter the market. Although fluoridation has been going on for over 60 years, and although fluoridated water is now consumed by over 180 million Americans on a daily basis, there has never been a single randomized controlled trial to determine the safety and effectiveness of either fluoridated water or fluoride supplements.

This may explain why the Food & Drug Administration still considers fluoride supplements as an unapproved new drug, despite over 50 years of dentists and pediatricians prescribing them to their patients. Keep this in mind the next time you hear a dentist or city councilor state that “thousands of studies” prove fluoridation is “safe and effective.”