Well, he could have been wrong or lying, but showed where little baby teeth were growing in... so who knows. :P He said some people can do it. Or had a few extra teeth.
His "regrown" teeth were not normal looking or impressive at all.
Edit: Flourine is more toxic than lead, I wouldn't put that in my mouth even if it cured lead poisoning. Some kids have died in the dentist chair after swallowing their flouride treatments in the past. (maybe it's safer now?)
Flouride treatments actually make bone and teeth more brittle, as they replace the calcium. (note, tempting controversy with this subject, I realize this. It's worth doing research on the topic)
Edit: I have flouride scarring on my teeth from childhood flouride treatments. This is a common thing.
Elemental fluorine may be more toxic than lead in some ways, but that's irrelevant here. The sodium fluoride added to toothpaste and water is a completely different animal from free fluorine or hydrogen fluoride, and has very low toxicity.
Fluoride treatments do not make bones and teeth more brittle, nor does fluorine "replace" calcium. Fluoride treatments are applied directly to your teeth, and work by converting some of the outer enamel into fluoroapatite, which is a more acid-resistant form of the predominant hydroxyapatite. If you rinse and spit after treatments and after brushing, you're ingesting very little fluoride.
In amounts far greater than those allowed in municipal water, fluorides can disrupt bone metabolism, causing loss of strength. By far the biggest sources of fluoride contamination in drinking water world-wide are natural, and pose a great challenge because fluorides are as difficult to remove as any other soluble salt.
The discoloration on your teeth is not a "scar" in any sense of the word, and unless you have clinically significant dental fluorosis, it is completely harmless.
Look into government research on dental carries (they don't use the word cavities) you will find that no treatment works if bacteria grows in the cracks of your teeth. Where tooth brush bristles can't get to, and acid from food is an irrelevant issue. Therefore, fluoride provides no benefit whatsoever as it doesn't fill in the cracks. (plastic sealants do though)
Here's how toxic the fluoride is that used by dentists.
"Referring to a common salt of fluoride, sodium fluoride (NaF), the lethal dose for most adult humans is estimated at 5 to 10 g (which is equivalent to 32 to 64 mg/kg elemental fluoride/kg body weight)."https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluoride_toxicity
From the New York Times, a child died from fluoride while at the dentist. (he ingested 3 times the amount needed to kill him)
"According to a Nassau County toxicologist, Dr. Jesse Bidanset, William ingested 45 cubic centimeters of 2 percent stannous fluoride solution, triple an amount sufficient to have been fatal."
Looks like you need to re-read that research :) Bacteriogenic acid is always the direct cause of dental caries, whether in crown fissures or on the sides of teeth [1]. Fluoride helps prevent the development and growth of crown fissures in the first place, and although fissures are difficult to clean once established, it's simply not true that fluoride "provides no benefit whatsoever".
Fissures are difficult to clean with bristle brushes, but it completely depends on their depth and shape. For years now I've had a couple of deep fissures in my molars that regularly get food stuck in them, and I have no problem cleaning them out with my Sonicare and toothpaste.
Regarding the toxicity of fluoride, you realize what a huge dose 32-64 mg/kg is don't you? Do you know how many tubes of toothpaste you'd have to eat to reach those levels? Take a guess. For perspective, the WHO's target for water fluoridation is 0.5-1.5 mg/L.
The William Kennerly case is the case cited by anti-fluoridation activists. Note that it occurred over 40 years ago, and other cases of acknowledged fluoride toxicity are exceedingly rare, in spite of the fact that millions of fluoride treatments are administered to children each year, and in spite of the vast number of toddlers caught eating toothpaste each year.
I should say that I'm not one to argue that fluoride is completely harmless, and I'm on the fence about its use on children. My kids used non-fluoride toothpaste until they started growing permanent teeth, and then I brushed their teeth until age 5 or 6. And I carefully impressed on them the importance of always spitting out the toothpaste, actually using the word "poisonous" to motivate them.
Consider the context of this entire discussion, self healing of teeth without the need for dental help, this includes fluoride.
I've seen people with their teeth eaten away from drinking super sized gulpies from 7Eleven, so it's not true that "bacteriogenic acid is always the direct cause of dental caries", anything that will dissolve your teeth can cause a cavity.
If you really want the truth, keep looking on government websites, all my information on tooth decay came from there, not conspiracy nuts.
Idle thought: what's the pH of bog-standard gulpies?† The sugar in them is definitely going to encourage bacteria, so I wonder what the relative contributions to tooth decay are from the gulpy itself and that due to the acid from the bacteria that feed off of the gulpy.
† Further idle thought: is gulpy/slurpy a pop/soda/coke thing?
The lady I knew specifically that literally destroyed her teeth would buy a couple 32oz "things" (I think it was called a "big gulp") and sip on it all day.
Her molars were tiny bits of spikes sticking up in the back, it was nasty. I was 16 at the time and asked why she didn't stop drinking that stuff when her teeth got bad? She said something like "You think the coke is hurting my teeth?" (yes, she hadn't even considered it)
So, I don't think the bacteria had time to grow, it was probably all dead from the coke. :P And it was diet coke, so no sugar to feed off of.
> "I've seen people with their teeth eaten away from drinking super sized gulpies"
Oh really? So you made sure that their tooth decay had nothing to do with the bacteria in their mouth? How did you do that? Did you take regular cultures of their mouth bacteria? Did you monitor and analyze the progression of the tooth decay to determine the proportion that was caused directly by food acid, rather than by bacterial acid? What were your methods exactly?
If you did all of these things, perhaps you should submit your findings to a journal, where they can be compared to similar research, performed inumerable times over the last half century, which shows that bacteriogencic acids are the overwhelmingly predominant cause of tooth caries.
Yes, I'm aware that you can erode your enamel away by brute force with soda pop. Here's one documented case: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2676420/. You'll note that the paper specifically calls out the concomittant role of bacteriogenic decay, and endorses the utility of fluoride treatment in its prevention.
> "If you really want the truth, keep looking on government websites"
You mean like the list below? Really, this is getting silly. I'm happy that you have your dental health well in hand, but you're strangely insistent on maintaining ignorance as to why what you're doing might be working.
His "regrown" teeth were not normal looking or impressive at all.
Edit: Flourine is more toxic than lead, I wouldn't put that in my mouth even if it cured lead poisoning. Some kids have died in the dentist chair after swallowing their flouride treatments in the past. (maybe it's safer now?)
Flouride treatments actually make bone and teeth more brittle, as they replace the calcium. (note, tempting controversy with this subject, I realize this. It's worth doing research on the topic)
Edit: I have flouride scarring on my teeth from childhood flouride treatments. This is a common thing.