Dr John

Does Fluoride lower IQ? New JAMA Study weighs in | LIVE YouTube video by Dr John

Link to LIVE Stream:
youtube.com/live/2_Kt5Xm...

New Study on Fluoride Exposure and Child IQ appearing in JAMA Pediatrics

New study on fluoride exposure and IQ may require current public health policies to re-evaluate the practice of adding fluoride to the water supply. Has water fluoridation finally met its match?

See what it all means during my new LIVE stream tomorrow!
(link below)
Saturday 2/1
1PM PT (4PM ET)

Hope to see you there!
youtube.com/live/ZRrE57n...
Fluoride in our Water: the science you need to know
LIVE STREAM with Q&A
Thursday 1/16 at 5PM Pacific Time (8PM Eastern Time)

Kicking off my first live stream on Fluoride, which has recently sparked controversy in the US over its safety in the water supply. The views are divided & tough to navigate. In this stream, I'm going to provide answers using the current scientific research of how fluoride can affect your health.

This is a great article citing the frustrations faced by legitimate scientists when presenting their work to an online audience. Popular science is flooded with algo-optimized terms, misrepresented graphic images, and science factoids bereft of relevant significance or context. Worth a read👇#SciComm

My limited experience has shown me the best science discussions are on THIS platform. Aside from a couple of notable exceptions (who also happen to be on here as well 😅)

This is why I’m frustrated at the tech world. Science can point out externalities of tech. These aren’t great selling points in VC pitches, so they’re vehemently ridiculed and ignored.

Awesome! Thanks so much! Excellent list and thanks for putting it together!

Nice list. Could I be included on here as well? Appreciate your work in getting this together!

Oh boy, not sure I like where this is headed. Need to check it out!

It’s literally a calming experience. The name is true to form.

That’s an interesting case study as well. And right, this was likely a very biased work. I’ll be on the lookout for others. I was seeing where this info of IQ and fluoride was coming from and sort of gasped at the highest ranked published study in search. The media should dig into this more.

And yes, I would suspect other environmental factors would play a much larger role in IQ than fluoride concentration. It's not clear what the physical mechanism would be for Fluoride and brain activity. Bone can at least act as a binding element for the negative ions.

Really appreciate you sharing your thoughts on this. I couldn't believe this was peer reviewed either. Not 100% sure if this is the main study on the matter, but it seems riddled with error and inconclusive at best. It was the first study to appear in Google search on the matter.

I second that! And add me to that list as well 😅

I thought so as well. The study concludes with an extremely low p-value as well. It’s more than subtle data massaging.

What are your thoughts? 🤔 Let me know! I'm working on a video for my YouTube channel on this topic, and the more input from experts and scientists, the better! Best comments will get put in the video :)

🧪4/ IQ tests in general are very questionable scientifically. It is widely believed that they're unbiased & fair, but in reality, the tests probe specific cognitive biases held by the test makers. It's difficult to interpret how these tests apply to disparate villages under non-Western education.

Distribution of IQ grades of the children based on fluoride concentration. SOURCE: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5285601/table/T5/

🧪3/ The correlation in the data only arises after artificially binning the IQ levels. For example, the authors of the study assigned grade 1 as IQ >95%, grade 2 as IQ between 75-95%, grade 3 as 25-75%, grade 4 as 5-25%, and then grade 5 as <5%. The divisions and cutoffs are arbitrary.

Correlation between IQ and fluoride concentration in total patients SOURCE: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5285601/figure/G2/

🧪2/ The fluoride concentration levels along the horizontal axis are out of order. The Fluoride concentration does not monotonically rise from left to right, but the trend line monotonically decreases. This is misleading data presentation.

Mean IQ levels based on fluoride concentration among boys and girls. Source: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5285601/table/T4/

🧪1/ The mean IQ is actually highest for the medium level of Fluoride concentration (1.2-2ppm). In the study, participants consuming the medium Fluoride levels scored on average 15 points higher in boys, and 17 points higher in girls.

Effect of fluoridated water on intelligence in 10-12-year-old school children The aim of the present study was to evaluate the relationship of drinking water fluoride levels with children's intelligence quotient (IQ). Water was collected from initially identified endemic fluori...

🧪Is this the slam-dunk study claiming negative correlation between IQ and fluoride concentration in water?

There's a lot of wrong to unpack here (comments below), but if I'm missing something (on either side of the argument), please let me know.
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

Wow! Incredible stuff. I can’t believe how fast the rotation rate is! Pulsars are like the data centers of the Milky Way!

Wow, thanks for the great explanation! I need to read up more on pulsars. I regret not taking more astronomy in grad school. The signal looks great and the precision is really extraordinary to see.

And a few follow ups 😅 What characteristics of the binary star can you determine from the pulse spectra? Rotation rate? Mass? Distance? Again, really cool to see this and thanks for sharing!

This is so neat! Feels like I’m in the observatory. What is the pulse phase axis? Everything is centered at 0.5. Is this real-time pulse duration in seconds?

The #SciComm starter pack is almost full. Make sure to revisit it as l’ve added lots of folk this week.

Do share it and flag up if you’d like added.

go.bsky.app/VJQzace

Taking the higher road is, in itself, an effective argument. It's disarming. Opens the door for true dialogue. Not for everyone. But for enough.

Right, fully agree. Hitting at some nuance here, which is why this is a complicated topic.

Right, this is the pitfall of acting too far outside your field of expertise. This is how scientists are weaponized and distrusted. I hesitated saying scientists should speak outside their domain of expertise. A particle physicist speaking on the solar system, okay. But on COVID, not a good look.