News from the Music Industry

The folks in my community have been arguing about fluoride again. A nutritionist wrote in the local newspaper that fluoride is a deadly poison and that it doesn’t reduce tooth decay. She recommended avoiding it entirely, even to the extent of buying nonfluoride toothpaste. I responded with a calmly reasoned guest column trying to separate the scientific facts from policies and opinions. The scientific facts are not open to debate: fluoride in optimum amounts reduces tooth decay; too much fluoride can be harmful. The public policy question is open to opinion and debate: should we add fluoride to the water or protect our children from tooth decay by other means?

I know that at least one person read my guest column, because there was a letter to the editor in the following issue of the paper. It was written by a very confused woman who signed herself “Reverend.” She disregarded my arguments about the effectiveness of fluoride and the advisability of separating facts from opinions, and she fixated on one thing: her opinion that adding anything to our water is wrong. She’s certainly welcome to her opinion, but she based that opinion on pseudoscientific nonsense that she confused with scientific truth. She wrote:

I am saddened that Harriet Hall is not aware of the latest
scientific research by Dr. Masaru Emoto. In his two books, The True
Power of Water and The Hidden Power of Water he describes the
healing capabilities of non-toxic water (chemical free). Our
country is too toxic from pollution, food, thoughts and water we
drink…. I suggest people go to Dr. Emoto’s lecture … and see
the slides of microscope samples of the toxic, repulsive water
crystals compared to those of pure untainted water. Or, see the
movie What the Bleep Do We Know now on DVD, which shows slides of
the difference in their molecular structure. Which would you want
to drink?

I wrote back that she was wrong that I wasn’t aware of Dr. Emoto’s “research.”

His newest book, Hidden Messages in Water holds a place of honor on
my bookshelves as the worst book I have ever read. It is about as
scientific as Alice in Wonderland. Emoto took pictures of
snowflakes and “observed” that clean water made prettier crystals.
A [real] scientist would have checked to see if he got the same
results if he didn’t know beforehand which water was clean. Emoto
never bothered with even this most elementary double-check. He
didn’t consult real scientists. Had he done so, they could have
told him that these snowflake crystals, just like raindrops, form
around a core of dust, so actually the cleaner water is less likely
to form them. Their beauty varies with the temperature and
conditions of formation, not with the purity of the water. The idea
that snowflakes could show anything about differences in the
“molecular structure” of water is incompatible with basic physics.
Emoto’s popularity is a sad commentary on the scientific illiteracy
of our society. His work is a morass of factual errors,
misconceptions, misinterpretations, metaphors, and meaningless
assertions. He writes in the language of magical thinking and
superstition, not of science. Most serious scientists find Emoto’s
delusions too silly to even acknowledge, but one retired chemistry
professor has taken the time to debunk water cluster pseudoscience
and Emoto’s “research” on his Web site:
www.cheml.com/CQ/clusqk.html.

I didn’t mention that I saw the What the Bleep movie and didn’t find it particularly convincing as a scientific document. Its credits list the 35,000-year-old warrior Ramtha “as channeled by J.Z. Knight.”