You know things are bad when scientists are suggesting that we latently medicate everyone with antidepressants via our drinking waterhttps://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2018/10/24/18010592/future-perfect-podcast-lithium-drinking-water-suicide …
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Replying to @nic__carter
"Maybe a state could randomly add lithium to some of its reservoirs but not others, or, conversely, a high-lithium state could try removing it from the water." Wow this seems like a great idea.
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Replying to @jzlegion @nic__carter
They already do that, accidentally. Different processes remove different amounts, the groundwater concentration is already changing every day and from location to location and year to year. The only difference is that you are totally ignorant of any harms you already suffer.
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this is not an argument for adding more on purpose, though.
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Sure it is. And on practical grounds, adding is better than subtracting for experiments: typically much easier to implement and creates larger effect sizes. It's also the more justifiable one ethically: available evidence points to it helping, and subtracting hurting.
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I think mass medicating populations is unethical. We might just have to agree to disagree on that one.
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And I think standing by & potentially depriving entire populations of critical micronutrients, literally driving them into insanity and death, without doing the simplest experiment indistinguishable from what Nature is already inflicting on people to find out if so, is unethical.
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Frankly I think it's a BIT melodramatic to say that not adding more lithium to the water supply is "literally driving them into insanity and death"


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I'm not sure why. I mean, that's literally what the claim is. Quite literally, that's what the possible causal effects would be.
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Pretty sure I won't go insane for lack of enough lithium in my water. Mlso, maybe there's an underlying cause for all this depression we should be treating rather than mass-medicating everyone. Just a thought. Medication without treatment of root causes is useless.
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The 'root cause' is often just genes or infections or nutrient deficiency. There was no 'root cause' for goiters/retardation/rickets: the 'medication' of adding iodine or iron or vitamin D to random stuff like salt to 'mass-medicate' was in fact the least useless thing possible.
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we're both talking about depression and suicide here, right? If not and you're talking specifically about fluouride, I still think the millions would be better-spent on providing toothpaste kids and educating them on oral hygiene.
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Yeah, I mean lithium specifically. (Although I do think I agree about fluoridation - given that the benefits seem to be entirely from topical application, why are we bothering with adding it to *drinking water*? The correlations of water/caries don't seem very impressive.)
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