Gathering a Group about Water Quality, Beginning with Fluoride Supplementation

A growing number of people are considering information about something many of us grew up with and never really thought much about: flouride being added to water at treatment plants.  You will notice topics recently added at Lumigrate.com, in this forum currently titled 'Supplementing What You Eat and Drink", which provide various Lumigrate-invited providers' offerings about fluoride. I suggested their linking out to resources they respect and would suggest for people to learn from if they were intrigued by their piece/article. Interestingly, they each had very different resources and approached different aspects without it being 'planned'.  

So it was very easy for us to have provided a good 'palate' of information on the topic at Lumigrate.com.  Contrary to how a newspaper might present information about fluoride, in the medical 'pond' that Lumigrate is paddling around in, nobody thinks adding fluoride to drinking water is a good idea, but I definitely encourage people to always get other opinions then decide what their opinion is, then act accordingly.  I also believe it is our obligation as citizens to spend some of our time talking to people about the things we are learning which can help us change the Earth we are living on and the outcomes for it and the animals, people included, on it.   

Since I am, by education and work experience, a specialist in the functional / occupational therapy and health education aspects of health/medicine/wellness, I will focus here as the 'moderator' and 'organizer' for the group of people who are 'activating' to potentially make changes in our community.  And by reporting upon the steps we take and how things go, those following in our path might opt to do something similar in their community and we'd be facilitating that, making it easier for them to follow suit.  

For those who might not know my background or the history of why I created Lumigrate.com, I have had significant chronic illness issues and fortunately took a proactive approach about related to finding out the cause(s), often times through providers and tests insurance did not cover, then more importantly, proactively 'taking-charge' and doing at least some of what I can to restore my wellness. It's a process! My health issues hit bottom around age 29, over two decades ago, when, on top of a full time job with Colorado State University, I resumed courses to complete a degree in occupational therapy.  

I entered my new career with the unique vantage point of being frustrated as a consumer AND a provider, and I am committed to bringing solutions which I believe to be 'health care reform' to individuals through information at Lumigrate.com.  The website went 'live' on the Internet in March of 2009, just before my 49th birthday, twenty years after I had a sudden and dramatic change in physical strength and endurance and could no longer walk a flight of stairs or a block without resting. Naturally, toxins in what I drank was only one part of what 'brought me down', but everything adds up like a teeter-totter or an old fashioned balance-type scale.  

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure: Personally, I want to see those who are well stay that way, and help people who are on the slippery slope from wellness to illness to find the underlying issues that might be contributing to their teeter totter 'dumping them' on the ground.  Much harder to get up once you're there in the dirt and get back up to where you're way up in the air than to keep things on the level or above.  Hence my interest in flouride being added to water in many treatment plants.    

I have been concerned about flouride for a long time, and going to the added expense on my time, energy, and money to obtain water for cooking and drinking that does not contain flouride or chlorine.  To be clear, there is nobody that I know of arguing that chlorine needs to be added to water when it travels through lots of pipes to reach the consumers, but fluoride is another story! Naturally, people have learned that chlorine will outgas from the water if you leave it open to the air, but I will add a sidenote that now some forms of chlorine that is added does not bubble out.  So people with fish hopefully got the memo on that, or those who were leaving water sitting to get rid of chlorine for human consumption.  

Now, to concentrate on fluoride: If I wanted to put fluoride into my body, why not leave that up to me as a consumer?  The vast majority of water that is treated and sold is NOT consumed by people anyway (about 1/2 of 1% is), so even if it WAS good for people to consume, doesn't it make more sense to have it not be in the water that goes on our lawns, in our car washes, down our toilets and shower drains?  Some of the topics the other experts at Lumigrate.com have provided give the history as to how this unfortunate 'tradition' started in the US.  I find it fascinating so I hope you do as well. 

When I moved to Grand Junction in 2004, I used to get water delivered to my house in big 5 gallon containers, but there were a number of reasons that was not working so well for me.  So I started looking into getting a filter, and if there was only chlorine to contend with, the $50 filter on my showerhead could be used to fill up pitchers of water and it is forseeable that a family could economically have healthy skin, hair outside and insides with gut health (where much of your immune system resides, to put it simply) by eliminating the chlorine.

As a health educator and advocate and specialist in function, I am always looking for legitimate products that are accessible to the greatest number of people, and in these economic times, that has meant that most people can afford to invest in filtering chlorine out but most cannot afford filtering out flouride, as that essentially means using reverse osmosis. 

So this 'mission' we are on that I am reporting on here for Lumigrate.com's readers, started last year when I was, as usual, frustrated with driving and lugging bottles to fill and lug back home in the back of my car, just because the people I pay to provide water for my use presume that I want flouride in it.  I mean, "Really?...." just seems to apply here!   I had been approached by a very nice, fun woman who distributes a multi-level/network marketing water filter/magnetizing product at about the same time a clerk at a store, who likely sold the same product in a home-based business beside 'the day job', suggested that ceramic filtering was the best way to go. So I agreed to trial it and I liked the convenience, it wasn't an unreasonable price, though it was several hundred dollars, but when I asked specifially about fluoride, it reduces but not elminiated it I was shown / told.  It just was clearly unfortunate, in my opinion, to have it be impossible for people to inexpensively filter the chemicals from their water if they wished to not consume them.  

I had not looked into the history of when 'they' started "feeding us flouride", as I like to think of it.  I recall growing up in the 1960s and having some kids in our school who had moved from elsewhere whose teeth were marked and it was from living where there was excessive fluoride naturally in the water.  

In our kitchen, atop the box canister that held flour, sugar, coffee, tea, there was a dark glass bottle of tiny prescription fluoride tablets, prescribed by a dentist, becasue we were in the mountains and had well water.  My parents disagreed about whether it was wise of the dentist to have prescribed it, and so the bottle sat there, mostly unused, for many years. We got flouoride in the toothpaste and that was sufficient the prevailing parent reasoned. I have joked that my teeth are the only thing on me which has not been expensive health-care-wise; 4 fillings total.  All the girls who grew up around me went to different dentists and all continue to enjoy 'good teeth'.  Naturally, that is subjective, but it is my experience and to me, it perhaps helps explains my position and commitment to this issue. 

Early in the spring of 2011, I had become a patient of local 'holistic dentist', Jim Kennedy, DDS,  to correct long-standing problems I had never realized came from the bones of my head having not moved/formed correctly in my formative years, which resulted in TMJ dyfunction which somehow evaded most providers' detection and diagnosis; my chiropractor had found issues when I was in my early 30s but he found a lot of things and addressed them and when conventional providers and dentists didn't pick up on the symptoms, I was not focusing on TMJ, I have PLENTY of other things to chase around fixing in restoring my functional wellness.  

So I asked Dr. Kennedy his opinion about flouride, as well as my general dentist, and got two different opinions.  

So I started looking into it and naturally asking around the Lumigrate providers. I invited Dr Kennedy to join the team helping educate people here, and his initial pieces have been very well-received, about childhood orthodontics and TMJ dysfunction and treatment.  

In the fall, I was contacted by a D.C. (Doctor of Chiropractic Medicine), Jeff McCloskey, who had joined a practice in town headed up by the D.C. who had spoken in the past to my 'live' health education group for those with chronic illness/fatigue/pain, Dr. Wes Sheader, who heads the area's chiropractic association. Dr. Jeff wanted a resource for his patients for support/education and I've been exclusively working through Lumigrate.com and 'virtual technologies' in addition to phone/Skype and e-mail for consultations on health navigation and function changes and how to address them.

We decided to work together to get an education group for providers and then the public on various topics.  We had met related to foods and inflammation as spring arrived and presumed that would be where we started with provider/consumer round-tables, as the topic Dr Jeff provided on foods and inflammation was just 'eaten up' by our readers.  

However, in mid-May the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel newspaper ran a story that was the match that lit us into action! Palisade, Colorado, at the far east end of the Grand Valley of western Colorado, one of four water providers, had stopped adding flouride!  And there was concern being raised by some. There were others who, like us collaborating at Lumigrate.com, believe for many reasons, it should not be added.  Please read the other topics on flouride our providers have added for our benefit with education; in addition to the doctors I have written about here, who live locally, we have topics from an environmental medicine specialist from Dallas, Texas who is our regular contributor from the M.D. perspective, and a former medical research scientist who has been working on her son's medical issue remediation for as long as I have been whittling away on mine.  

I am going to be reporting here, ongoing, related to what the steps we take and the results.

Our hope and goal is making positive changes in our community, and if those reading in other communities are also being 'fed fluoride in their water' feel similarly related to having that "simply" stopped, you'll have the tools here to make it as streamlined and beneficial as possible for YOU to try the same. We will be sharing here what we prepare and experience as we go, and others can modify it for their specific purposes.   

To paraphrase Yoda: 'There is to do.. there is to not do  ......... there is no 'try'.  In reality, we are all humans dealing with organizations and systems that are long established and rooted in what they have done in the past, and sometimes having them look at the present with a 'clean pair of glasses' is a challenge. And "the people" have to accept or otherwise 'deal with' what those in power decide, ultimately. I hope in the near future I'll be able to inexpensively filter water at my tap and drink it, without it having an impact on my thyroid/body. 

Wish us luck, "we're going in", and please stay involved with us here so when it's time to lend your support, you'll be able to let others know of your support for this type of change.  

You can read about our second meeting by clicking on the link above this topic toward the right that says "Supplementing What You Eat and Drink" and see it in the list with the topics by our medical/science experts, plus one abou water in general for wellness I created.  We created our name (SWIG - Safe Water is Great) and had some fun with the Love Blanket for our summer of love like 1967 only better as we have the Internet now!  At least that's how it feels to me! 

Live and Learn. Learn and Live Better! ~~ Mardy

 

Mardy's note: I am happy to report mid-summer 2012 that this was another step toward what has resulted in the group of four of us locally which named our group "SWIG: Safe Water is Great", we have prepared a logo, mission statement and story of the group, and we have set out navigating our way to educate people 'out there' -- locally and beyond.  The three medical providers in SWIG Grand Junction created education on Lumigrate and then I reached out to included two medical/science experts from Lumigrate who live "beyond Colorado" too (North Carolina and Dallas).

Dr McCloskey then took the key concepts from ALL our educational pieces here at Lumigrate, after we had thoroughly discussed things over our FUN and challenging dinner conversations, and prepared a 'organization/business-level statement letter' to be used as needed in the future. I volunteered to work that into a multi-purpose "statement and story" about SWIG to post here at Lumigrate for all who come to find it.  

Therefore, please follow this link to that 'key document' from our group efforts:

 www.lumigrate.com/forum/swig-safe-water-great-our-official-statement

...(and I am putting a similar note in each topic we have at Lumigrate about this fluoride and water safety issue -- we have a growing number of topics, please look around if you're wanting to learn more details about fluoride and the history, topically/in toothpaste, or how we went about each step!) ~~ Mardy