Bioethicist proposes adding lithium to US drinking water
bigthink.com
bigthink.com
Still, on the offchance they do start doing it, I'll be first in line for rainwater tanks, so I can protect the purity of my precious bodily fluids.
Let's take a look at the Table of Contents of the Journal of Bioethics shall we (http://www.bioethics.net/journal/)
* Should Human Beings Have Sex? Sexual Dimorphism and Human Enhancement
* The Risks of “Sexual Normalcy”
* Humans Should Be Free of All Biological Limitations Including Sex
* Response to Open Peer Commentaries on “Human Dignity and Transhumanism: Do Anthro-Technological Devices [nonbiological entities introduced into or attached to the human body] Have Moral Status?”
The whole discipline of bioethics is basically about trolling... or they're serious :/.
I thought "Bioethics attracts all the weirdos who want to propose really off the wall crazy crap" until I read that list. People actually get paid to write stuff like that?
There are, fortunately, some somewhat more sane bioethics journals, like the one named Bioethics, which has article titles that at least seem to involve legitimate issues at the intersection of medical practice and ethics, like, "Addiction and Autonomy: Can Addicted People Consent to the prescription of their drug of addiction?": http://www.wiley.com/bw/journal.asp?ref=0269-9702
Abstract/Extract Since the first sex reassignment operations were performed, individual sex has come to be, to some extent at least, a technological artifact. The existence of sperm sorting technology, and of prenatal determination of fetal sex via ultrasound along with the option of termination, means that we now have the power to choose the sex of our children. An influential contemporary line of thought about medical ethics suggests that we should use technology to serve the welfare of individuals and to remove limitations on the opportunities available to them. I argue that, if these are our goals, we may do well to move towards a “post sex” humanity. Until we have the technology to produce genuine hermaphrodites, the most efficient way to do this is to use sex selection technology to ensure that only girl children are born. There are significant restrictions on the opportunities available to men, around gestation, childbirth, and breast-feeding, which will be extremely difficult to overcome via social or technological mechanisms for the foreseeable future. Women also have longer life expectancies than men. Girl babies therefore have a significantly more “open” future than boy babies. Resisting the conclusion that we should ensure that all children are born the same sex will require insisting that sexual difference is natural to human beings and that we should not use technology to reshape humanity beyond certain natural limits. The real concern of my paper, then, is the moral significance of the idea of a normal human body in modern medicine.
Um... If you feel this strongly about it, then go put lithium in your water. Don't make me buy bottled water. I've been on lithium before. I'd prefer to spend the rest of my life as far away from ingesting it as possible.
Care to explain?
By the way, what are you on now?
As with fluoride, I wouldn't want my community to be the first to test it - perhaps if I can convince my neighbours to support a local nuclear power plant we would be spared being guinea pigs on the lithium issue.
That and systemic reviews such as the York review (http://www.york.ac.uk/inst/crd/pdf/summary.pdf) which basically states there has been very little high-quality studies done on the effects of water fluoridation.
Admittedly that systemic review was released in 2000, and unfortunately for conspiracy theorists the York review concluded there may be a slight benefit and at worst a slight disbenefit to water fluoridation, but in their executive summary they did say:
"Given the level of interest surrounding the issue of public water fluoridation, it is surprising to find that little high quality research has been undertaken"
That's almost half a century since we've been touting the 'scientifically proven' benefits of water fluoridation, which I just find stunning.
So unlike yourself I'm very unimpressed with the scientific evidence, and have come to the conclusion that a half-baked health policy was implemented in an age of questionable scientific rigour.
Human and establishment tendency to refuse to admit fault or error has guaranteed this rather flaky practice continues in many parts of the west today.
At the levels they are talking about, it seems like there are communities who for decades or longer have been "testing" drinking water with the proposed levels of lithium.
Of course, that's assuming that the deliberately introduced lithium is in the same form, with the same chemical availability. I would hope that would be a requirement if anyone actually decided to try and do this.
Even if lithium was added in 7up[1] before the fifties, it's not drinking water and you don't take your bath with 7up or cook your potatoes with it...
Er. That's a pretty big logical fallacy. Almost every substance ingested in huge quantities is lethal, including salt and caffeine.
If they're going to make you drink something daily for a lifetime without your informed consent, I expect some reason better than cutting down a few bucks of dental care expenses.
The fluoride is in enough concentration to be effective in the brief time it passes through your mouth (that's the idea, isn't it? Or is it supposed to somehow work systemically after ingested?). A tube of toothpaste will last a few weeks. There is, in principle, reason for concern. To claim it's scientifically proven to be safe you need lifetime double-blind studies controlling for any pernicious effects, which they obviously didn't run before starting this. A shame, considering there's apparently plenty of people who would be happy as uncompensated guinea pigs.
Or even better, by avoiding sugar and eating calcium rich vegetables.
I think we need to make changes to how we live our lives before we resort to using drugs if we can avoid it. What's next? Dieting drugs in our water?
And, even when the condition can be remedied by life changes, good or bad (is moving to Seattle and suffering from depression deserving of criticism?) doesn't it make sense to buy time by treating the major life threatening symptoms, i.e. trying to kill yourself?
I'm merely saying that living a healthy, active and happy life would produce good results and help to avoid needing to take drugs. Is that wrong? Naive?
Naive or not, I think an active healthy lifestyle is something that we should all strive for. Work and hope for the best.
I speak as someone who, despite my parents best intentions, was not raised to approach life in a 'healthy active' manner, and have only arrived at that point after leaving my parents' well-meaning clutches.
So, the people who this would most help are generally not that way by choice or even responsibility, so to talk of their right to not drink lithium water seems off the mark. I'd love to give people the right not to have incapable parents, because that would do a whole lot more for this cause than anything else.
It does beg the question though. If small doses are effective, why do people only get prescribed massively higher doses?