Quote:
Originally Posted by mikey_the_redneck
Why would they hate it?
More dental caries = more business = more money
|
Because people often choose a profession not simply because they make lots of $$, but because they
care about it, they have a passion for it.
They want to see kids not have to go through the pain and cost of dental procedures.
This "more business = more money" style of rhetorical argument only makes sense to the "X is a conspiracy to make people Y so they can make more $" crowd.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mikey_the_redneck
Hey are these people "ideologically driven", or "quacks"?
|
No one is immune from ideological drives, that's why we have science, to avoid the ideological stuff.
Are they quacks? I don't know, probably not, and really it doesn't matter. If what they say had merit, they can publish it in top level journals which will have weight and be taken seriously, other scientists can take the results into account, and the process take place.
Instead, you reference a journal from an organization who's sole purpose is to promote an anti-fluoridation stance. "Hey lets start a journal to gather all the articles that support our conclusion." That's ideological, not evidence based.
You talk about "international conferences", but the conferences are also organized by the same anit-fluoridation people. There's international conferences for people who have been probed by aliens and people who think Obama is a foreign Muslim not born in the US, big deal.
And you miss the whole point. You list some people and ask if they are quacks, implicitly making an appeal to authority argument that the argument has merit simply because the people making the argument are educated and not crazy. You do the same thing by talking about a conference, there's a conference so it must have merit.
But you ignore all the exact same arguments that could be made from the opposite side. PubMed turns up 6000 results for a search of fluoride and teeth. I can list as many pro-fluoridation scientists as you can anti (and far more probably). I can show papers from journals, etc.
So you accept the ones that support your conclusion, and you reject the ones that don't. Classic flawed reasoning.