Bigots, Fools and Liars 2:Doctors and Tobacco

Posted by Daveg on September 07, 2007, 06:31 AM | #

anyone going to brussels next week?

Posted by WE Russell on September 07, 2007, 09:46 AM | #

I wonder if these facts are as reliable as this proofreaders spelling ability.

Posted by Robert Reis on September 07, 2007, 11:26 AM | #

Good read here:
http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/

My race, right or wrong”

Vick and his defenders
 
By ANDY NOWICKI

Posted by George Matthews on September 07, 2007, 11:31 AM | #

Some seond hand smoke may not be dangerous, but if you are in a small bar packed with people and they are all smoking, I can ssure you it is dangerous. I was in a bar one night packed and most were smoking. There was such a haze that you couldn’t see aross the room. My eyes were watering. I didn’t stay in there but an hour or so. Later that night my hands were itching very bad. This wes second hand smoke and it wouldn’t be something you would want to be exposed to on a daily basis. If they are arguing that second hand smoke isn’t bad for your health are they saying it’s good for your health? I don’t think so. I would like to see the cigarette companies put out of business.

Posted by PF on September 07, 2007, 03:38 PM | #

What about this:

A meta-analysis of over 50 studies on involuntary smoking among never smokers showed a consistent and statistically significant association between exposure to environmental tobacco smoke and lung cancer risk.

Just thinking reasonably about it, leads me down this path:
Everything a smoker inhales causes the risk present for the smoker.
Everything the smoker exhales, in a larger volume of air, represents the risk
present for the second-hand smoker.

The only two factors reducing the risk for the second-hand smoker are
1) absorption of chemicals in the lungs of the first-hand smoker
and 2) dilution of smoke through air volume.

Considering all the hundreds of chemicals and carcinogens in cigarette smoke,
I cannot imagine that the portion of them being absorbed upon first-hand smoker inhalation is very high—the lungs, insofar as they act as a filter at all, must be a very imperfect one. So most of these chemicals are probably being exhaled into second-hand smoke.

The second question is simply a matter of volume of air in which the smoke is diluted.

The conclusion of this article (“even the most exposed passive smoker inhales the equivalent of 0.02 of a cigarette a day”) is for me counterintuitive and contradicts my own personal experience. I feel very ill even in having 3 or 4 cigarettes smoked in my presence. The implication that the first-hand smoker is experiencing 50 times as much chemical irritation as I am experiencing is beyond my ability to accept.

Posted by endo on September 07, 2007, 07:12 PM | #

the article writer is an advocate of hate…he hates to be integrated into a society.

The national socialists in Germany introduced strict laws on public smoking and
for that reason alone everybody should smoke!

I would even go as far as calling him a “rat”.
Rats love garbage.
Name calling is all they have at their disposition.
Bigot….fools…liars…ha ha ha, who loves this word?
Yes, bigots, fools and liars do, the terminology is very revealing.
Antisemite has become too tricky these days. But bigot has this beguiling ring
to it doesn’t it?

Posted by Englander on September 07, 2007, 09:05 PM | #

I feel very ill even in having 3 or 4 cigarettes smoked in my presence. The implication that the first-hand smoker is experiencing 50 times as much chemical irritation as I am experiencing is beyond my ability to accept.

I think there is a distinction between a genuine health risk from passive smoking and temporary feelings of discomfort felt when someone in close proximity to you is smoking. I feel pretty unwell if sat next to someone eating strong garlic-flavoured food, but that doesn’t mean my health is at risk. Smoke getting in your eyes is bound to cause discomfort, it might even cause skin irritation, but that doesn’t mean it’s destroying your lungs or your heart or otherwise doing you any permanent damage.

Note, I’m not suggesting there are no harmful long-term effects from passive smoking. I haven’t looked into the matter.

Posted by DW on September 07, 2007, 09:09 PM | #

The deluded baby boomers instituted the cessation of wide spread smoking.  They think they are going to live forever.  They’re worried about getting a hard on at 55, instead of thinking about the next generation.  SMOKE UP and live your life like the Chinese… They’ve been around much longer.

Posted by Robert Reis on September 08, 2007, 04:23 AM | #

http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/326/7398/1057

BMJ 2003;326:1057 (17 May), doi:10.1136/bmj.326.7398.1057
Paper
Environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco related mortality in a prospective study of Californians, 1960-98
James E Enstrom, researcher1, Geoffrey C Kabat, associate professor2
1 School of Public Health, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1772, USA, 2 Department of Preventive Medicine, State University of New York, Stony Brook, NY 11794-8036, USA
Correspondence to: J E Enstrom .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Abstract
Objective To measure the relation between environmental tobacco smoke, as estimated by smoking in spouses, and long term mortality from tobacco related disease.
Design Prospective cohort study covering 39 years.
Setting Adult population of California, United States.
Participants 118 094 adults enrolled in late 1959 in the American Cancer Society cancer prevention study (CPS I), who were followed until 1998. Particular focus is on the 35 561 never smokers who had a spouse in the study with known smoking habits.
Main outcome measures Relative risks and 95% confidence intervals for deaths from coronary heart disease, lung cancer, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease related to smoking in spouses and active cigarette smoking.
Results For participants followed from 1960 until 1998 the age adjusted relative risk (95% confidence interval) for never smokers married to ever smokers compared with never smokers married to never smokers was 0.94 (0.85 to 1.05) for coronary heart disease, 0.75 (0.42 to 1.35) for lung cancer, and 1.27 (0.78 to 2.08) for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease among 9619 men, and 1.01 (0.94 to 1.08), 0.99 (0.72 to 1.37), and 1.13 (0.80 to 1.58), respectively, among 25 942 women. No significant associations were found for current or former exposure to environmental tobacco smoke before or after adjusting for seven confounders and before or after excluding participants with pre-existing disease. No significant associations were found during the shorter follow up periods of 1960-5, 1966-72, 1973-85, and 1973-98.
Conclusions The results do not support a causal relation between environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco related mortality, although they do not rule out a small effect. The association between exposure to environmental tobacco smoke and coronary heart disease and lung cancer may be considerably weaker than generally believed.

Posted by Robert Reis on September 08, 2007, 04:29 AM | #

Dear PF,
France is a country where honest researchers are fined and imprisoned for reaching politically incorrect positions and the dishonest are well rewarded for confirming the party line.
Things have gone steadily downhill since the German tourists left in 1944.
Since the American Cancer Society lies; one cannot expect the situation to be better in France.
Cheers,
RER

Posted by _jimbo_ on September 08, 2007, 07:01 AM | #

how long have people been ‘puffing away’ on cigars & pipes if not ciggies?....how come, in the last 30yrs or so, there is a sudden ‘recognition’ of the health dangers?....once again, there’s an un-bridgeable ‘abyss’ between what is published in peer-reviewed scientific journals & what is spruiked in the MSM!

if u believe a non-sense like ‘the Holocaust’, then wtf shouldn’t u believe heapz of other ‘non-senses’?....interestingly: the rise in ‘the anti-smoking lobby’ co-incides with the rise in Holocaustianity….(and, also, the rise in gun-control)....r these issues related? prblby not!....except for the fact that the same tribe of repulsive reptillians is behind them all! why? oy gevalt!.....there’s a few shekels in it!

Posted by Fr John on September 08, 2007, 06:04 PM | #

“Michael Crichton, Medical Doctor and world famous author has spoken out:
“…So I can tell you some facts. I know you haven’t read any of what I am about to tell you in the newspaper, because newspapers literally don’t report them. I can tell you that DDT is not a carcinogen and did not cause birds to die and should never have been banned. I can tell you that the people who banned it knew that it wasn’t carcinogenic and banned it anyway. … We knew better, and we did it anyway, and we let people around the world die and didn’t give a damn.”
“I can tell you that second hand smoke is not a health hazard to anyone and never was, and the EPA has always known it.””

Since when is Crichton a DOCTOR? I know him only as a FICTION writer. The quote above is from his FICTIONAL NOVEL, “NEXT.”

“The national socialists in Germany introduced strict laws on public smoking and
for that reason alone everybody should smoke!”

Actually, that, and the invention of the Volkswagen, along with a whole HOST of other inventions the WORLD took from the Nazis, was the point at which I began to question the notion that “The Germans are evilllll” and that the “Hollow hoax” was, as well.

For that reason, NO ONE should smoke.

OF course, people do get crazy. Look at the collapse of global warming….

http://newsbyus.com/more.php?id=9489_0_1_0_M
then listen to the Democrats talking about ‘sustainability.’ Oh, I just proved my prior point! LOL

Posted by Robert Reis on September 09, 2007, 04:28 AM | #

“Aliens Cause Global Warming”

A lecture by Michael Crichton
California Institute of Technology
Pasadena, CA
January 17, 2003

I say it is hugely relevant. Once you abandon strict adherence to what science tells us, once you start arranging the truth in a press conference, then anything is possible. In one context, maybe you will get some mobilization against nuclear war. But in another context, you get Lysenkoism. In another, you get Nazi euthanasia. The danger is always there, if you subvert science to political ends.
...

In 1993, the EPA announced that second-hand smoke was “responsible for approximately 3,000 lung cancer deaths each year in nonsmoking adults,” and that it ” impairs the respiratory health of hundreds of thousands of people.” In a 1994 pamphlet the EPA said that the eleven studies it based its decision on were not by themselves conclusive, and that they collectively assigned second-hand smoke a risk factor of 1.19. (For reference, a risk factor below 3.0 is too small for action by the EPA. or for publication in the New England Journal of Medicine, for example.) Furthermore, since there was no statistical association at the 95% confidence limits, the EPA lowered the limit to 90%. They then classified second hand smoke as a Group A Carcinogen.

This was openly fraudulent science, but it formed the basis for bans on smoking in restaurants, offices, and airports. California banned public smoking in 1995. Soon, no claim was too extreme. By 1998, the Christian Science Monitor was saying that “Second-hand smoke is the nation’s third-leading preventable cause of death.” The American Cancer Society announced that 53,000 people died each year of second-hand smoke. The evidence for this claim is nonexistent.

In 1998, a Federal judge held that the EPA had acted improperly, had “committed to a conclusion before research had begun”, and had “disregarded information and made findings on selective information.” The reaction of Carol Browner, head of the EPA was: “We stand by our science….there’s wide agreement. The American people certainly recognize that exposure to second hand smoke brings…a whole host of health problems.” Again, note how the claim of consensus trumps science. In this case, it isn’t even a consensus of scientists that Browner evokes! It’s the consensus of the American people.

Meanwhile, ever-larger studies failed to confirm any association. A large, seven-country WHO study in 1998 found no association. Nor have well-controlled subsequent studies, to my knowledge. Yet we now read, for example, that second hand smoke is a cause of breast cancer. At this point you can say pretty much anything you want about second-hand smoke.

As with nuclear winter, bad science is used to promote what most people would consider good policy. I certainly think it is. I don’t want people smoking around me. So who will speak out against banning second-hand smoke? Nobody, and if you do, you’ll be branded a shill of RJ Reynolds. A big tobacco flunky. But the truth is that we now have a social policy supported by the grossest of superstitions. And we’ve given the EPA a bad lesson in how to behave in the future. We’ve told them that cheating is the way to succeed.

Posted by Robert Reis on September 10, 2007, 04:46 AM | #

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A few years ago The New York Times ran a cartoon that showed two Washington DC policy experts having a conversation. “In Washington the search for truth is a creative process. First, you create a premise. Next you create a statistic to back it up. Then you create an audience by repeating it over and over again, until the media pick it up. That’s when you know that you’ve done it.”

“Done what?”

“Created a fact!”

Just add Atlanta—the home of the Centers for Disease Control—to Washington and you have a pretty good idea of how obesity science and policy are made these days. Despite the fact that the CDC has been caught out creating “statistics” to back up the “fact” of an obesity epidemic, it appears to be neither embarrassed nor remorseful. As the Associated Press reported:

“CDC Director Dr. Julie Gerberding said because of the uncertainty in calculating the health effects of being overweight, the CDC is not going to use the brand-new figure of 25,814 in its public awareness campaigns and is not going to scale back its fight against obesity.”

So let’s get this straight. When the CDC’s numbers said that obesity was overtaking tobacco as the leading cause of death, allegedly killing 400,000 Americans a year, it was all right to use that 400,000 figure non-stop to scare us into losing weight. But when the real number turns out to be just short of 26,000 then the CDC is so worried about “uncertainty” that they aren’t going to use the figure. Obviously, Dr. Gerberding did not get her doctorate in logic.

The reason, of course, that Dr. Gerberding does not want to use the supposed 25,814 deaths (remember, we’re not even certain there are this many) from obesity as the basis for a new campaign in the war on fat is that, well, as things go, it just isn’t terribly useful. Gerberding knows that it is pretty hard to talk about an epidemic if you’ve only got 25,000 victims, and without talk of an epidemic it’s pretty difficult to get the media’s attention, Washington’s money and, most importantly, push through a host of coercive policy measures that tell Americans what they can and what they cannot eat.

But notice, the good doctor isn’t going to let a few hundred thousand fewer deaths stop a good thing. Despite the lack of credible statistics, we just “know” that obesity is still killing millions of Americans—even if we can’t find where they live—and there is no reason to “scale back” the fight against obesity. Now that’s what makes the CDC and much of official Washington such scary places. Typically a good public policy process first finds clear evidence of a substantial problem and then goes about finding a policy solution. Evidence drives and shapes policy. But here we have policy “creating” evidence. Even though the supposed justification for intervening into the lives of millions of Americans is now defunct, the claim that fat causes early death is still made and the campaign against obesity still goes forward.

Of course, what Dr. Gerberding was too modest to tell the Associated Press is that the 25,814 figure is not destined to survive for long as it is just too inconvenient. Already someone, somewhere, has started the tedious but very necessary work of crunching some more acceptable number that will bolster the “fact” of obesity=premature death back into headline-grabbing territory. But just to make that enterprise as difficult as possible, here are a few non-Washington statistics from the last 50 years about the alleged dangers of being overweight and obese.

First, take the study that really started the “obesity epidemic”, the 1999 JAMA published research “Annual Deaths Attributable to Obesity in the United States” which suggested that being overweight was responsible for about 300,000 deaths a year in the US. If you look at this data you find that individuals with BMI’s of 25—overweight—have a lower risk of dying prematurely than those with BMI’s of 20 or normal weight. Again, those with BMI’s of 20 have the same risk of premature death as those with a BMI of 30—obese.

Second, take another widely cited study, “Overweight, Obesity and Mortality from Cancer” (New England Journal of Medicine, 2003) which like the JAMA article generated huge headlines with its claim to provide a definitive account of the obesity-cancer relationship. The authors claimed that up to 90,000 cancer deaths a year could be avoided if every adult kept his or her BMI below 25. Yet the data actually shows something quite different. People with BMI’s of 18.5-24.9 - normal—had a cancer mortality rate of 4.5 deaths per 1000 study subjects while individuals with BMI’s of 25-29.0—the overweight—had a cancer mortality rate of 4.4 deaths per thousand—actually lower. In other words, for the 100 millions plus Americans who are classified as overweight there was a negative correlation between being overweight and dying from cancer.

Nor are these findings flukes. Ancel Keys, the proponent of the cholesterol-heart disease theory, who over 25 years looked at fat and mortality rates in Japan, Greece, Italy, Yugoslavia, the Netherlands, Finland and the United States came to similar conclusions. Published as the Seven Country Study in 1980, Keys found the risk of premature mortality due to excessive weight increased only at the extremes of over and under weight. A recent study looking at a group of Europeans from his original data found men with BMI’s of less than 18.5—that is thin men—had almost twice the mortality rate of either normal or overweight men, even controlling for smoking. The study further found that being overweight—a BMI of 25-29.9—had no effect on mortality and even those men who were obese still had lower death rates than the thin men.

A similar pattern was found in a 1996 US study that re-analyzed data from previous studies involving more than 600,000 subjects. The study found white males with BMI’s in the normal range of 19-21 had the same mortality rate as those with BMI’s of 29-31—overweight and obese. Again, for non-smoking white males, the lowest mortality rate was found with BMI’s of 23-29, a range that includes the overweight.

Perhaps as we wait for the next set of statistics that purports to show us dying by the thousands from our fat we can console ourselves with the one genuine fact in this sorry mess which is that we have more to be worried about in junk science than in junk food.

The author is a health policy writer living in Canada.

Thursday, March 23, 2006

Posted by Robert Reis on September 11, 2007, 04:37 AM | #

Secondhand Bullshit
http://libertyed.org/noforce/2006/08/secondhand-bullshit.html

There are so many oft-repeated lies about smoking and its effects that it has to be the most believed hoax in the history of man….

I understand non-smokers not liking smoke. There are a lot of things I don’t like. …

If you don’t like smoke, take a stand, but stop perpetrating the lies in order to justify forcing others to abide by your likes and dislikes. At least be an honest socialist and admit that you just enjoy making others do what you think is good for them. It’s as elitist as forcing democracy down Iraq’s throat… it’s good for them, isn’t it?
....
1. We all know that non-smokers die of the same diseases smoking is blamed for… but you choose to ignore what is staring us in the face.

2. We all know that, since HALF the smokers have quit, no diseases have even diminished, and that asthma has INCREASED. Ignore that one too.

3. We can all easily discover that there are other nations with far more smokers and no smoking restrictions, that have lower rates of cancer, and heart disease, etc. Ignore that one too.

4. We all know some really old smokers, don’t we? Oh, yeah… those must be the exceptions that prove the rule.
....

“You’re damaging our lungs!” It used to be that I was damaging MY lungs, but when the anti-smokers discovered that I didn’t believe it and wasn’t interested in stopping… they INVENTED second-hand smoke. Yes, invented. Smokers wouldn’t buy the health arguments because they didn’t feel unhealthy, so a whole new approach was invented… making smokers feel liable for the health of others. It has been a very successful ploy, but it has absolutely nothing to do with science or health. It’s nothing less than a full-blown, massively successful hoax.

Here’s a tidy little piece of evidence against which to judge what you’ve bought into… smoker’s lungs are black and gooey, and bound to fail, aren’t they? I’ve seen non-smokers actually imagining my lungs and feeling pity for me. They watch me sucking that evil smoke into my lungs, and think I’m insane. We all know it’s true, don’t we? We’ve seen the photos. Who in their right mind would want lungs like that? MAYBE YOU?

Dr Judy Morton, a respiratory physician at the Alfred Hospital in Melbourne, will tell a conference in Sydney today that there is no evidence patients who received lungs from smokers faced a shorter life expectancy than other lung transplant recipients.

“There isn’t evidence to say that lungs that are damaged by smoking and still functioning well do any worse than perfect lungs,” she said. Dr Morton said several other conditions apart from smoking, including asthma and infection, rendered lungs less than perfect.
…

To a non-smoker, and certainly to an anti-smoker, smokers must be idiots. You may feel sorry for us, because you’ve heard that we’re addicted and just can’t help our poor selves. It just couldn’t be that smokers smoke because it does them good… could it?

Here’s a recent news story you probably missed:

Nicotine Found to Prevent Some Diseases

For years consumers have been warned about the dangers of smoking, but now doctors say one ingredient found in cigarettes may hold the key to good health.

Studies have found that smokers using the nicotine patch to try and kick the habit were less likely to develop a variety of diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s because nicotine can stimulate receptors in the brain that deal with learning, memory and concentration.

“Nicotine by itself, independent of the smoking issue, can in fact turn out to be a very useful medication,” said Dr. George Bartzokis, director of the University of California’s Alzheimer’s Center. “In fact there’s a lot of evidence that it may turn out to be a very useful medication.”

Researchers also believe that nicotine could help younger people fight illnesses such as short-term memory loss, attention deficit disorder (search) and depression.

Golly gee, folks… haven’t we been hearing a lot more about ADD and depression among our kids… as the war on smoking has progressed? Nah… that couldn’t be cause and effect. It couldn’t be possible that smokers smoke to make themselves feel better, to concentrate better, or to combat depression? There I go again, forgetting that we’re all too stupid to detect what’s good for us.
” around the world.

posted by Robert Ronald Smith at 10:37 AM