Posted on 04/15/2005 1:46:21 PM PDT by Publius6961
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| "Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored" - Aldous Huxley |
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Understanding
Smoking Bans
Odds and Ends
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In February 1998, according to usual scientific practice, a paper reporting the main study results was sent to a reputable scientific journal for consideration and peer review. That is why the full report is not yet publicly available. Under the circumstances, however, the authors of the study have agreed to make an abstract of the report available to the media.
It has now been 7 years, and the complete report is still suppressed.
Might it be reasonable to assume that the report was in fact buried because it did not indicate that the very basis being used to pass unreasonable laws prohibiting smoking outdoors in public parks and beaches is a fraud based on no scientific basis whatsoever?
Arbitrary, crapricious and unconstitutional comes to mind.
I thought that you might be interested in some parts of this story. I noted the part about children of smokers being less likely to get lung cancer.
by the way, I don't smoke, but don't care if people do.
Yes! And anything by Dave Hitt we can trust, that's for sure. Here's another one:
Excerpted. Read whole article here.
| Journal of Theoretics Vol.1-4 Oct/Nov 1999 Editorial |
Smoking Does Not Cause Lung Cancer (According to WHO/CDC Data)*By: James P. Siepmann, MD Yes, it is true, smoking does not cause lung cancer. It is only one of many risk factors for lung cancer. I initially was going to write an article on how the professional literature and publications misuse the language by saying "smoking causes lung cancer"1,2, but the more that I looked into how biased the literature, professional organizations, and the media are, I modified this article to one on trying to put the relationship between smoking and cancer into perspective. (No, I did not get paid off by the tobacco companies, or anything else like that.) When the tobacco executives testified to Congress that they did not believe that smoking caused cancer, their answers were probably truthful and I agree with that statement. Now, if they were asked if smoking increases the risk of getting lung cancer, then their answer based upon current evidence should have be "yes." But even so, the risk of a smoker getting lung cancer is much less than anyone would suspect. Based upon what the media and anti-tobacco organizations say, one would think that if you smoke, you get lung cancer (a 100% correlation) or at least expect a 50+% occurrence before someone uses the word "cause." Would you believe that the real number is < 10% (see Appendix A)? Yes, a US white male (USWM) cigarette smoker has an 8% lifetime chance of dying from lung cancer but the USWM nonsmoker also has a 1% chance of dying from lung cancer (see Appendix A). In fact, the data used is biased in the way that it was collected and the actual risk for a smoker is probably less. I personally would not smoke cigarettes and take that risk, nor recommend cigarette smoking to others, but the numbers were less than I had been led to believe. I only did the data on white males because they account for the largest number of lung cancers in the US, but a similar analysis can be done for other groups using the CDC data. You don't see this type of information being reported, and we hear things like, "if you smoke you will die", but when we actually look at the data, lung cancer accounts for only 2% of the annual deaths worldwide and only 3% in the US.** When we look at the data over a longer period, such as 50 years as we did here, the lifetime relative risk is only 8 (see Appendix A). That means that even using the biased data that is out there, a USWM smoker has only an 8x more risk of dying from lung cancer than a nonsmoker. It surprised me too because I had always heard numbers like 20-40 times more risk. Statistics that are understandable and make sense to the general public, what a concept! The process of developing cancer is complex and multifactorial. It involves genetics, the immune system, cellular irritation, DNA alteration, dose and duration of exposure, and much more. Some of the known risk factors include genetics4,5,6, asbestos exposure7, sex8, HIV status9, vitamin deficiency10, diet11,12,13, pollution14 , shipbuilding15 and even just plain old being lazy.16 When some of these factors are combined they can have a synergistic effect17, but none of these risk factors are directly and independently responsible for "causing" lung cancer! Look in any dictionary and you will find something like, "anything producing an effect or result."18 At what level of occurrence would you feel comfortable saying that X "causes" Y? For myself and most scientists, we would require Y to occur at least 50% of the time. Yet the media would have you believe that X causes Y when it actually occurs less than 10% of the time. As ludicrous as that is, the medical and lay press is littered with such pabulum and gobbledygook. Even as web literate physician, it took me over 50 hours of internet time to find enough raw data to write this article. I went through thousands of abstracts and numerous articles, only to find two articles that even questioned the degree of correlation between smoking and lung cancer (British lung cancer rates do not correlating to smoking rates)19,20 and another two articles which questioned the link between second hand smoke (passive smoking) and lung cancer.21,22 Everywhere I looked, the information was hidden in terms like "odds ratio," "relative risk," or "annualized mortality rate." Most doctors probably could not accurately define and interpret them all these terms accurately, let alone someone outside the medical profession. The public relies on the media to interpret this morass of data, but instead they are given politically correct and biased views. If they would say that smoking increases the incidence of lung cancer or that smoking is a risk factor in the development of lung cancer, then I would agree. The purpose of this article is to emphasize the need to use language appropriately in both the medical and scientific literature (the media, as a whole, may be a lost cause). Everything in life has risk; just going to work each day has risk. Are we supposed to live our lives in bed, hiding under the blanket in case a tornado should come into our bedroom? We in science, have a duty to give the public accurate information and then let them decide for themselves what risk is appropriate. To do otherwise is a subtle imposition of our biases on the populace. We must embrace Theoretics as a discipline that strives to bring objectivity and logic back into science. Every article/study has some bias in it, the goal is to minimize such biases and present the facts in a comprehensible and logical manner. Unfortunately, most scientists have never taken a course in logic, and I'm sure that English class was not their favorite. Theoretics is a field of science which focuses on the use of logic and appropriate language in order to develop and communicate scientifically credible theories and ideas which will then have experimental implications. As someone whom I respect says, "Words mean things." Let us use language and logic appropriately in our research and in the way that we communicate information. * * * * * Yes, smoking is bad for you, but so is fast-food hamburgers, driving, and so on. We must weigh the risk and benefits of the behavior both as a society and as an individual based on unbiased information. Be warned though, that a society that attempts to remove all risk terminates individual liberty and will ultimately perish. Let us be logical in our endeavors and true in our pursuit of knowledge. Instead of fearful waiting for lung cancer to get me (because the media and much of the medical literature has falsely told me that smoking causes lung cancer), I can enjoy my occasional cigar even more now...now that I know the whole story. * * * * * |
Thanks for the ping. Bookmarking for reference.
"Fact: On March 8, 1998, the British newspaper The Telegraph reported "The world's leading health organization has withheld from publication a study which shows that not only might there be no link between passive smoking and lung cancer but that it could have even a protective effect."
Even more evidence that second hand smoke is little more than another media scare.
I can't believe the scientific community is refusing to allow this study to be released. Makes me wonder if some U.N. bigwig just thought the report stepped a little out of party lines and they're trying to use this as an excuse.
In any case, we need to get people to realize that smoking is a personal decision and stop the rampant laws against things which aren't hurting anybody else.
Thanks for the post. Facts will never stand in the way of the smoking ban proponents, however.
For your purusal : )
Thank you for putting this out in front of folks!!!!!
While I have never met him personally, Dave Hitt is a fine man. He does not work for the tobacco industry and undertook this research on his own dime and time.
BTTT
My, my - an MD that GETS it!!!!!!!!
why in heaven's name is this not being SCREAMED from the rafters.
People like you and me gt ridiculed for saying these things with claims that we don't know what we are talking about because we do not have the "medical" background. Well here it is in black and white.
Reading these studies and properly interpretting them does not take a medical professional - all it takes is some time and the comprehension of the English language.
Good article.
The problem is that the MSM and the academic grant mills are spending a lot of time and money trying to convince people that they are being hurt by the legal actions of others.
Until we can change the mindset of people who have their likes and dislikes spoon fed to them by agenda driven frauds, we lose.
These folks view themselves as safe inside society's warm cocoon and prefer groupthink and conformity over the perceived dangers of independent thought and analysis.
How do we fight that?
Oh yeah, welcome to FRee Republic.
Because the highly paid professional ANTI's would loose all that M O N E Y they have lining their fat greedy pockets!
People like you and me gt ridiculed for saying these things with claims that we don't know what we are talking about because we do not have the "medical" background. Well here it is in black and white.
Oh sure. The ones in FR that hate smokers think that we pull this information out of our butts just because they don't want to hear the truth because they can't HANDLE the truth. heh!
Reading these studies and properly interpretting them does not take a medical professional - all it takes is some time and the comprehension of the English language.
To which some of the FReepers in here can't do. Period.
From the Attorney Generals, to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to the state Board's of Health, City Councils and certain lawmakers, we smokers have been totally screwed. All of the above found a way to make big bucks, and guess who is is the losing end? The SMOKERS!
I will remind you of another thing:
Big Pharmaceutical (Do Smokers Feel Used Yet?)
A long time ago people either smoked or they didn't. It was no big deal because it wasn't an issue. The people of earth got along fine knowing they had freedom of choice without even knowing they had it.
Then some really smart guys in white coats that work for Big Pharmaceutical got together and said, "Hey, we are always getting slammed when one of our drugs takes a dirt nap." "Wouldn't it be great if everyone in the world had to buy their nicotine from us?!" "Think of the money we could make... wow!"
Unfortunately there wasn't anyone around with two working brain cells to slap them on the knuckles and tell them to go home and thank God they are free citizens.
So it came to pass that Big Pharmaceutical paid groups, now known as "Antis" to make smoking politically incorrect. Antis are very rich people today. (But this backfired on Big Pharmaceutical when they created this monster because as the tobacco money is running out, the Antis are going after other things, like your waistline.)
The Antis made it so horrible to use a legal product that people can be beat up and killed in the name of the Smoking War, and no one will bat an eyelash. After all, smokers don't count, they don't have any rights, and who will stand up for a cause that they created and made taboo? That whole bit about Second Hand Smoke kills went out the window the day they started including smokeless tobacco on the bans. The "For the good of the children" went down the drain when over time not one dime has gone to the children and all the money grabbing is as obvious as the nose on your face.
Have we, as the human race, learned anything from all of this? Nope. It's all about the money. It won't stop until all freedom-loving citizens of the planet stand up and say they have had enough. Stop this and spend money on serious stuff like feeding starving children instead of taking rights with a legal product away from adults. Don't allow the Antis to create a problem where there was none for their own gain.
As for those guys in the white coats... way to go Bubba! Not since Hitler have we seen a bigger and more messed up attempt to change the human race.
The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) used to have it posted on their site, but I can't find it under the same document title as when I downloaded it years ago. However, you can point your fellow freeper to get a copy here. The conclusion was, "Our results indicate no association between childhood exposure to ETS and lung cancer risk. We did find weak evidence of a dose-response relationship between risk of lung cancer and exposure to spousal and workplace ETS. There was no detectable risk after cessation of exposure." However, it is important to note that their calculations for childhood exposures were, "ETS exposure during childhood was not associated with an increased risk of lung cancer (odds ratio [OR] for ever exposure = 0.78; 95% confidence interval [CI] = 0.64-0.96)," which means that their data indicated that children exposed to parental smoking had less of a risk of contracting lung cancer later in life than children not exposed. So when they say childhood exposure was not associated with increased risk, they weren't lying, but they were misleading because their results did indicate it was associated with decreased risk. Pretty incredible, eh?
Bookmarked for reference.
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