NZ School Dental Statistics 2015

The latest New Zealand School Dental Statistics have been published and show – you guessed it – NO difference in decay rates!!

First I must say I don’t live in New Zealand, but in the UK.

Around 20 years ago my husband was diagnosed with fibromyalgia. At age 42, and self employed, he had no choice but to try and carry on through the dreadful pains, exhaustion, muscle spasms and headaches. At that time we were living in an area with fluoridated water. We subsequently moved to an area with natural spring water, where things seemed to get a little better, yet the frequent headaches continued.

Around 10 years ago, after we moved again, the headaches turned into daily migraines and ever increasing doses of otc painkillers did little to help. From there we began the consultant route, seeing both neurologist and headache specialists. MRI and CT scans showed boney spurs in the cervical neck, with spinal cord compression. Highly invasive surgery was discussed, but it was decided we should wait until loss of feeling in his arms and legs occurred. Really unpleasant drugs were prescribed in stepped increasing dosage but the side effects were so bad my husband just stopped taking them. They never helped the migraines at all.

Last Christmas, we realised we would not be getting any real help from doctors and my husband fell back on constantly rotating doses of ibuprofen with lysine, and paracetamol. Just after Christmas, on a whim, I bought some Alodent toothpaste, fluoride free. The next morning I asked the regular question on waking up : “how’s your head this morning? ” When he replied “I don’t have much of a headache actually” I was really puzzled. I started looking at what we’d done the previous day, what we’d eaten, what we hadn’t eaten or used, what pillows were on the bed. THE ONLY THING ABNORMAL TO US WAS THE NEW TOOTHPASTE!

On a research mission, which I had done many, many times over many years, I started reading everything about fluoride, good and bad, from every pathway my little laptop had ever known.

We started a diary, and slowly, day after day after day, the migraines became just little dull headaches, and after 3 weeks they had stopped altogether. We bought a reverse osmosis system to take out any naturally occurring fluoride in our non fluoridated water supply, and polished it off by filtering that water through a separate specal jug filter (takes water to zero ppm). We ditched our favourite strong tea, in favour of fresh ground coffee with the occasional cup of weak, white tea. We stopped buying calfornia wines (our favourite weekend treat), and grapes and raisins had to be organic or nothing. It’s been around 120 days since we went on a mission to rid fluoride from our daily lives. In that time frame, my husband would have suffered around 90 migraines, ten severe headaches and 20 dull, can’t quite think straight foggy headaches, always emanating from the base of his skull. Instead, he has had 6 very mild morning headaches not needing anything to help, 3 level 3 (out of 5) headaches needing medication, and 110 mornings without any headache whatsoever. I have asked the question over and over again, how could we not have known???

I have never suffered headaches, obviously only a few suffer from the extreme sensitivity my husband experiences with fluoride, just as only a few will suffer greatly from strawberries, peanuts, shellfish etc. One person’s meat is seriously another person’s poison. You can choose to avoid buying any of those things but water that comes through your tap, how do you avoid that? We are lucky enough to have the ability to install a complex water filtration system. Just the other day we were out visiting for the day and I thought, a few cups of tea with unfiltered water wouldn’t hurt that much. Oh my goodness, was I wrong! My husband didn’t even know he wasn’t drinking tea made with bottled or filtered water, he just developed a thumping headache as we were setting off for home.

He is currently taking antioxidants, in the hope that over time, the fluoride deposits within his body will be greatly reduced.

Jane Dowse

Years and Years of Headaches gone