The Difference Between Dose and Dosage
There is a serious problem with adding medication to the water supply: Everyone drinks a different amount of water. Although the City of Toronto is very good at adding a precise amount of hydrofluorosilicic acid (fluoride) to our drinking water, that water is consumed in vastly different quantities by vastly different people.
When a doctor prescribes their patient a medication, there is a process of evaluation of the patient's physical and mental condition. This gives the doctor an idea of the proper amount and intake schedule of a particular drug.
If treating obesity for example, one would treat a person who weighs 500 lbs differently than someone who weighs 200 lbs. Why? Because the 500 lb person requires more care when changing their diet and lifestyle than the person who weighs 200 lbs.
This is the reason why it is so important to evaluate people on a patient-by-patient basis, to ensure the doctor provides a recommendation based on the individual patient's circumstances.
When adding a medication to the water supply, we dispose of this personal tailoring and replace it with a "one size fits all" approach. The City of Toronto is currently doing this by adding 0.6 ppm or mg/litre of fluoride to our drinking water, down from 0.8 ppm in 2005, and 1.2 ppm in 1999.
This means that every single litre of water now contains 0.6 mg of fluoride. So, although the dose of 0.6 mg/litre is constant, the dosage (the duration or frequency) is different for all of us depending on how much water we drink. So how much fluoride should we ingest on a daily basis?
The answer? There is no answer.
Of all the medical and public endorsements of fluoride such as the Centers for Disease Control announcing fluoride to be one of the "10 Great Public Health Achievements of the 20th Century", not a single medical, governmental or other resource states how much fluoride we should ingest on a daily basis.
When a doctor prescribes a medication, the prescription details taking "x" amount of pills (dose) "y" times daily (dosage) to achieve optimal results. Yet with fluoride added to drinking water, we ingest "x" dose of fluoride and the "y" dosage becomes variable depending on how much water each individual drinks.
What doctor would give you a bottle of pills and say "Take as much as you like"?
There is nothing scientific about what the City of Toronto is doing to our drinking water. By adding fluoride as a medication to the water supply, the City of Toronto is saying that a 5-year old child can drink as much fluoride as he likes, and a 250 lb fire-fighter can drink 20 times the amount of that child on a daily basis for the rest of his life with no adverse side effects.
If fluoride is so good for us, why has a prescribed dosage never been established?
Are we to believe that individually tailored dosage doesn't matter?