I've read your call for "Fifty Thousand Current and Former Smokers Needed For National Lung Screening Trial." That will be the day when I hand my body over to you! I trust any anti-smoker organization as far as I can throw a battleship. And most smokers feel the same way.
You've funded and /or backed anti-smoker cells that have directed doctors to harass smokers that has resulted in smokers not going to the doctor, even though they're more than entitled since they pay so much more than anyone else and far beyond. Anti-smoker orgs. have manipulated scientific studies for the sake of lining their pockets with those thirty pieces of silver; basically stealing money from smokers and then telling the world you're concerned with our health; you couldn't care less about our health. The only health antis are concerned with is the wealth of their pockets! Exploited smokers. Extorted wealth.
You've seen to it that smokers a socially unexceptable and considered fourth class diseased citizens who do not deserve to live on the same planet with everyone else. The funding and backing that you've given these antis has made it possible for them to have our children taken away from us because we smoke, they've seen to it that we're denied employment; housing and MEDICAL CARE, deprived us of the right of free association, trying to keep us from our rightful pursuit of happiness by banning us from restaurants and other establishments offering forms of relaxation and entertainment. You've made it possible to stop smokers from flying and staying at their favorite vacation spot and worst of all; you've turned our children against us by showing them pig lungs and telling them it was a cancerous smokers lung, telling them that their parents are going to die because they smoke (you care at all about what this does to a child? It's frightening to them!) and teaching them hatred of smokers in their schools without their parents knowledge.
And you want smokers to bring their bodies in to you for a trial? That would be like sending any American into an al Qaeda camp; the camp of the enemy. An enemy that wants to dispose of us. What is the saying about the spider inviting the fly? You actually expect us to believe you. I think any smoker who would volunteer for your "Trial" has to be out of their mind or so very well brainwashed that they are bad Americans because they smoke. You want to use us as guinea pigs and at the very least we would be harassed the same as we are when we go to the doctors office; that's made very clear in your article. At worse.....well who knows ("...spiral computerized tomography ("CT or chest X-ray"); lets just say I'd never let you give me a shot of any kind, let alone take a lung biopsy (a potentially risky procedure*) because YOU say there are abnormalities.
I'm, by far, not the only smoker who feels this way. Congratulations!
Carol
California
The results will be rigged.
Isn't this the age when most people contract lung cancer ANYWAY? Whether they are smokers or not?
I'm not saying you should participate in this, but doing it independently is an excellent idea.
CT screening has the potential to save many smokers' lives. It can see tumors as small as a few millimeters, while they are still curable. The CT is much more sensitive than a regular chest X-ray; by the time a tumor can be seen on chest x-ray it has often spread elsewhere in the body.
If you don't want to participate in the research, suit yourself. It's the kind of stupidity I would expect from a drug addict who let himself get hooked on the weed.
Doctors don't give liver transplants to alcoholics or IV drug abusers. Why should they lift a finger to treat smokers, who are just as bad? Especially when their patients have the attitude you display here?
If I were the director of the NIH or the NCS, I would just cut off all research on lung cancer. Like AIDS, it is almost always a self-inflicted disease. There are many other innocent victims of disease on whom to spend our precious research dollars.
Tobacco-hooked drug addicts dying slow, painful deaths, drowning in a froth of their own blood, should blame their own foolish weak selves for their illness. Since they seem incapable of this, I would just as soon they blame paranoid ranters like you for stifling the research, instead of insulting the researchers who are just trying to help them.
-ccm