The stress imposed on smokers is toxic. Stress is a very know cause for heart attacks.

Staticians are very critical of the anti-smoking campaign stats and one of them was saying that the dangers of quitting were very obvious though.

Why don’t they tell us this? Oh, I forgot. They don’t give a damn about our health.

I don’t think that not asking patients about exposure is dishonest — it’s just lazy (if they’re doing a prospective trial; it’s impossible if they’re doing a retrospective one).

Moreover, a lot of what you discuss is not “nannies” perpetrating a hoax, though, it’s just plain old bad science reporting: no matter what the ridiculous finding, the initial report will be publicised and the sheepish retraction will not. It happens whenever anyone finds a spurious health risk or benefit to any common activity. And I think many of the actual findings are again not a “fraud” as you say, but simply bad science: bear in mind that there are entire journals that publish endless falsely positive trials of any kind of alternative therapy you like. Doubtless some of them are deliberate fraud to keep the money coming, but I think Hanlon’s Razor alongside reporting- and publication- biases are a better explanation for the phenomenon as a whole.

I don’t want to defend the practice, but words like “fraud” do make you look more than a bit paranoid. You might want to be careful not to look like an equal and opposite reaction to the worst lunatic fringes of the ban supporters.

I read the article and report that was posted by Mikayla while indulging in my omnivorous eating preferences. Anyone without some form of cranial deficit or another might ask… if the report was posted on 1/02/09… why would they not continue gathering data for 2007? Wouldn’t having all of 2008 be enough time to compile and post the findings?

I’m not saying that what was put forth wasn’t accurate, but what’s not being said is bugging me.

As an example, lets take smoking completely out of the picture and replace it with something else that people feel strongly about one way or another… red meat

I will stick up for an extreme vegetarian that claims to get sick at the smell of cooking meat standing on a soapbox yelling to the world the hazards of eating meat and the cruelty to the animals in the meat industry. I might even help them in a political campaign to mandate that eating establishments post clearly if they cook meat, have vegetarian food that is cooked on a separate grille or serve no meat.

If they however were to attempt to get meat banned everywhere but private property (ballpark franks would have to be changed out for tofu dogs)… how many people would be outraged?

…shouldn’t have used an analogy such as that, now I want a steak.

I said that a attributing a change in heart attacks within 2 months to a smoking ban is ridiculous. A significant change in 3 years is, I think, a bit more reasonable. I haven’t yet taken the time to comb though the study, but I’ve noted that they do at least provide the details. That tends to increases my confidence in the study at least a little bit.

Personally I think the smoking ban is a good idea regardless. It does affect my health, even if not in life-threatening ways. Second hand smoke irritates my eyes and lungs and causes my nose to clog up and my head to hurt. I live in a county under a smoking ban, but I was reminded of these affects second hand smoke has on me when I ate at a restaurant out-of-town last weekend. Even if second hand smoke didn’t cause long term health problems it is still noxious pollution.

As you pointed out in a previous comment, the very premise is ridiculous. The damage from primary smoking takes place after decades of smoking, so simple common sense will tell you that claims of huge reductions heart attacks immedatly following smoking bans are nonsense.

You’ll note that in this study they made absolutely no attempt to discover if the heart attack victims had any exposure to SHS, or if their exposure had been reduced. Honest researchers would have asked patents about their exposure.

The first study to create this fraud was done in Helena. You can read the details about it here:

http://www.davehitt.com/facts/helena.html

The Helena fraud was so successful it was, of course, repeated in other cities. And when the fraud is caught, as it was in the Scottish ban, it’s ignored by the same mass media that prominately featured the original claims.

In any geographic area there will be a natural statistical variation for any illness, especially one as common as heart attacks. In most places there will be no change. (It shoudl be notied that in most areas heart attckas are dropping, on their own, by 3-5% a year.) In others there will be an increase, in others a decrease. When a decrease happens to coincide with a smoking ban the nannies scream “Proof! Proof!” and “journalists” print their proclamations as if they were fact.

Smartenized people, such as yourself, laugh at the nonsense, but the stupid gobble it down and use it to further justify their hated of a quarter of the population.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/M/MED_SMOKING_BAN_HEART?SITE=KYLOU&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT