Quote:
Originally posted by sebastian_dangerfield
Vanity and stress release.
The devil's in the details. My problem with these studies is they all fail to tell people how very little being around second hand smoke, or drinking four cocktails a night, raises their risk. The people who put out these studies want them to be read, so they say "Second Hand Smoking Causes Cancer!"... and in the fine print, you read, "in one out of 3,000,000 people, 79% of whom have a mutation at gene CDK9."
A person who just reads headnotes (most of the press) takes the ball and runs with it. Then some idiot on a city planning board holds it up at a metting and says "We must ban smoke everywhere!"
And so misiniformation spreads further...
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Why do you think I sent you to Medline and the actual Surgeon General's report instead of some reporter's synopsis of the same studies? At the very least, read the conclusions at the end of each chapter of the Surgeon General report (hint: especially adult respiratory) to bolster your own position instead of shouting back that science is wrong. Scientific study is all about the fucking details, trying to parse which of a gazillion different factors is likely to lead to a specific result.
And you're so hyped up on lung cancer that you're forgetting all of the other health problems that have an association with tobacco smoke, including environmental tobacco smoke, like asthma, COPD, CHD, a variety of other cancers and reproductive problems. I'll talk to your oncologists if you talk to my pulmonologists. If a person doesn't have a genetic predisposition to lung cancer, he or she may very well have a predisposition to one of the other nasty, expensive to treat diseases that tobacco smoke exacerbates. And then I have to pay for his or her healthcare costs through increased insurance premiums or Medicare / Medicaid, and that's when it becomes a problem that I care about.
