Couldn’t the claims about water flouridation be easily tested?
I was reading today about water fluoridation, and its "effects". These include reduced(or, depending on who you ask, increased) aggression.
This interested me- not because I believe it, but because this has a hypothesis(water fluoridation affects you) with a predicted outcome(reduced/increased agression).
The first commandment of science is "Thou shalt test thy beliefs by experiment", and this seems the perfect opportunity.
What you’d need to do is get, say, three groups, relatively large. They’d have to stay at some kind of facility for the test- that is to say, they would only drink water specialy provided. One group would get standard fluorine levels, one would get a high(within safety limits) dose, and one would get pure, filtered water(as a control).
Have them play some specially designed or chosen violent video game- preferably one with a range of more aggressive or less aggressive tactics. A statistical increase in aggression in the fluorine groups would be… interesting.
I imagine you’d have to take measures to prevent the placebo effect(people think the drug will make them more aggressive, so they behave more aggressively).
Also, I imagine something like this taking place over a couple of weeks, so it might be a bit expensive. I know this is a pretty common issue, though, so some kind of confederation, between people who want to prove the effects of fluoridation and people who want to prove it’s harmless, might be able to scrape the money together.
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To me it seems a little weird that flouridation would be linked to aggression and not other clinical side effects, but yeah, it does seem interesting. If I’d done the question on flouridation in my last Chemistry research thingy, I might be more helpful than now after completing the task about insect repellents. though I swear I’d heard something about flouridated water being bad for your health despite good for your teeth, or something.
Anyway, as to the control group, I’d like to have them on distilled water rather than just filtered water, and a fourth group on filtered water perhaps. Isolate the possibility it’s something other than the flouride in the water.
Might I also suggest maybe putting everyone on distilled water or filtered water at the start of the test, maybe waiting a little before switching to the real test? Once again, trying to make sure whatever they were drinking before wasn’t having any partiular effect. Maybe get them to play the videogame before/during/after the test and stuff, to compare the trends. I mean, if you fluke it and the flouride groups are full of violent people to start with.. yeah.
Ah it just sounds like I’m picking it to pieces, but really I think it’s a pretty cool idea. Maybe it wouldn’t be an easy claim to test due to the sheer number of variables like people’s initial dispositions, what they’ve been eating, whether they play many videogames, etc, but I do think your test would be interesting if nothing else. I’d volunteer but I already know what’s sposed to happen.