Talk:Tobacco and health

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Archive 1: to + inc December 2007

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[edit] NPOV

Article does not have any information on positive stress relief effects for people who do not mind (or care about) carcinogenic elements of tobacco. Guroadrunner (talk) 00:21, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

I've just reverted your edits. If you don't like the lack of info on "positive stress relief effects" in the article, then you need to go out and find (a) evidence smoking relieves stress, (b) evidence that's positive in terms of physical or psychological well-being, and (c) include them in the article. I'm sure such studies exist, but please look for them yourself rather than unilaterally tagging the article NPOV because you have an unsourced, POV personal opinion about possible positive effects of smoking.
You also (1) removed a fact tag without giving a proper explanation (and this was a fact request for a negative effect of smoking, so if a source isn't found it should come out the article), (2) added a who tag to a sentence which cited the review in question a line further down, (3) selectively removed sourced poor survival data, and (4) cut two external links without explaining why they failed WP:EL. I reverted the lot. Nmg20 (talk) 02:17, 30 December 2007 (UTC)
I will deal with this tomorrow, but I can give reasons for all edits. Guroadrunner (talk) 06:07, 30 December 2007 (UTC)
Thanks. Look forward to discussing them. Nmg20 (talk) 11:38, 30 December 2007 (UTC)
First area - EL.
These are the EL I'm removing permanently:
* BBC News: Smoking a pipe 'damages health'
* University of Wisconsin Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention
The first is an article on pipe smoking that really should be a Reference, not an EL. Otherwise it's just a news article and that doesn't do anything or make it special. Use it for referencing instead.
The second is non-notable -- can you provide a rationale why the Wisconsin Ctr for Tobacco Research & Intervention makes itself more notable over other groups? Place the most prominent group in, not this.
Do not re-insert until discussed. Guroadrunner (talk) 16:14, 5 January 2008 (UTC)
Agree with both those. Thanks for the explanations. Nmg20 (talk) 23:51, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Tobacco Related Diseases

Just thought i'd make a query about the use of the term tobacco related diseases. It seems that many of the diseases have other causes besides smoking and it seems misleading to ascribe all the deaths caused by them to tobacco. I could be wrong but i checked the source and it seemed to be standard anti-smoking boiler plate. I submit that this sentence in its current form doesn't provide a honest interpretation of the facts

"Tobacco related illnesses kill 440,000 USA citizens per year,[6] about 1,205 per day, making it the leading cause of preventable death in the U.S "

also i'll clean up a few other wordings such as "set to kill" (121.45.104.247 (talk) 11:35, 3 January 2008 (UTC))

Many do have other causes, but the 438,000 figure (I'll correct it in a second!) refers solely to those attributable to smoking or exposure to smoke (per the CDC reference). In other words, if you added up all the cases of these diseases, you'd get more than 438,000 deaths - for instance, the myocardial infarction article reveals that about 480,000 people die of MI in the US each year, so those aren't all be being counted as smoking-related!
I also reverted the "set to kill" wording, as it's an accurate report of what was said in the article, and the changes made the sentence nonsensical. Nmg20 (talk) 15:15, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Convention for mentioning health in tobacco-related articles?

There's an ongoing discussion in Talk:Cigar #Health effects should be covered about whether the Cigar article should be silent about health issues (and merely put Tobacco and health in its "See also" section; see this version for an example), or whether Cigar should briefly discuss health issues and then list Tobacco and health in the main article (see this version for an example, and see this comparison for a difference listing). Is there some convention in this area that I'm not aware of? I personally find it strange that an article on cigars would not discuss health issues at all. Eubulides (talk) 00:10, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

I'm not aware of any convention. I think it would make the most sense to briefly mention any health risks involved in cigar smoking, with a {{see also}} to this page for a more detailed discussion. If we duplicate too much detail, these articles turn into denialist skeptical POV forks unless closely monitored. MastCell Talk 00:23, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Relationship of Lung Cancer and Tar in cigarettes

There is no subheading relating to the role of tar, how tar is formed in the burning of a cigarette, or the relationship between tar and lung cancer. This is a serious matter because I believe tar is the major threatening component. The tar is serves as the signficant medium of toxic chemical and free radical delivery that causes so much damage to the lungs.

Also, i think it needs to be addressed that there is no "half-way" discussion, the pros and cons are listed, but no discussion is entertained about how the media is rather extreme in their discussion of cigarettes, and no mention of devices which trap tar, such as Tarblock or Sino Cigarette FilterSino Cigarette Filters, which utilizes the Venturi principle to trap tar. Rook2pawn (talk) 18:20, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

Interesting idea. Do you know of any independent scientific work suggesting or supporting this? Nmg20 (talk) 22:52, 18 February 2008 (UTC)
I don't know what's really being said here in this paper but here is a quote I pulled from http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/abstract.cgi/crtoec/1998/11/i05/abs/tx970159y.html
"Previously, we have shown that aqueous cigarette tar (ACT) extracts contain a long-lived tar radical that associates with DNA in isolated rat alveolar macrophages and causes DNA damage in isolated rat thymocytes."
Tar is formed by the incomplete combustion of tobacco leaf proteins and sugars. There is no way to reduce tar, nor really a way to "add" tar. Tar is a product of burning.
This is why "Low-Tar" cigarettes have vent holes, because the gimmick is to just inhale less smoke, which obviously isn't quite effective. Since tar is sticky, the nicotine binds to the tar in the delivery to the lungs and body. Thus, trapping tar also traps nicotine, defeating the purpose of the cigarette. However, the cigarette "should" be relatively safe in the sense that >95% reduction (http://blocktar.com/labreport.html) of tar means that if tar is in fact the ultimate cause of lung cancer and diseases, then a tar "blocked" cigarette should be proportionally safer. There are reports that say reducing tar (as in low-tar cigarettes) contributes little to reducing cancer, which makes sense in that relatively similar amounts of tar is delivered and absorbed, but to actually find a way to trap tar seems quite different in what it could result in. Rook2pawn (talk) 09:58, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] British Doctors' study

User:HKTony has been trying to alter the British doctors study results as they're reported here. Quite simply, quitting smoking is not a primary analysis in the paper. The first mention of ex-smokers in the results section appears in the sixth section, after all the main analyses have been concluded, and former smokers get no mention in the abstract of the paper. The study never uses the word "quit", either.

With this in mind, the changes are ill-advised at best, as are suggestions that other authors need to read the paper. For reasons of weight, I suggest we focus on the primary analyses of the paper. Nmg20 (talk) 19:08, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

From the study - "The main analyses of mortality in relation to smoking seek to determine whether ... the death rate is related to the previously reported smoking habits.". 'Reported smoking habits' in the paper is not simply smoking or not smoking, it assesses a variety of smoking habits.
Re - "former smokers get no mention in the abstract of the paper" - the objective is stated as "To compare the hazards of cigarette smoking in men who formed their habits at different periods, and the extent of the reduction in risk when cigarette smoking is stopped at different ages". The original statement "smoking decreased life expectancy by 10 years" is biased as it represents the worst possible outcome of smoking as demonstrated in the study. A neutral statement would be "smoking decreased life expectancy by up to 10 years" - no? HKTony (talk) 19:54, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

I see what you mean - I was taking "previously reported" there to mean by the authors in previous reports on the data set, but it could equally mean by the patients. And I take the point about the phrasing of the effect on life expectancy - but looking at those Kaplan-Meier curves, there is almost no period except at the very start and the end of the graphs where the lines are less than ten years apart - so I'm wary of the change you suggest. Any other opinions? Nmg20 (talk) 08:34, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Randomized trial?

I am looking for a paper that will convince me that tobacco is a poison and not a medicine. So far, I have only seen papers discussing the correlation between tobacco use and disease, but this observation is consistent with tobacco being a medicine. Has there been a randomized trial to show that, for instance, quitting improves health? If so, I think that Wikipedia should link to it. If not, then I think we should try to explain how the existing observational studies on smoking are better than the observational studies which led scientists to erroneously conclude that HRT was beneficial. A5 (talk) 13:08, 6 May 2008 (UTC)