Should I be smoking? Probably not. Is smoking doing me any
damage? Most certainly it is. It does not require a genius or
endless sets of research papers to know that inhaling smoke
which contains countless chemicals at high temperature into very
delicate lungs, is of no benefit whatsoever and is going to be
positively harmful. On top of all that it is becoming
increasingly expensive. So why do it?
Is it harmful to other people? We have been inundated with
statistics which show that passive smoking is harmful. I have
one little concern as to how they gather these statistics.
Consider how you would go about it? Would you simply rely on
people's response to questions? How exactly are causal links
established when no proper scientific studies have been carried
out..
To determine the effects of passive smoking you would first have
to consider all the other air pollutants that people are exposed
to in the course of their normal daily lives. Traffic fumes,
aerosols, bonfires, pollen, dust, and the list goes on and is
very extensive. Smoke from tobacco is just one of the pollutants
we are exposed to. Then you take several thousand individuals of
similar ages, height, and weight distributed evenly between the
sexes. In your first test group you have several hundred of
these you expose to all the possible pollutants; the second
group are exposed to all bar one; the third group are exposed to
all bar a different one and so on. Then you have a second trial
in which one group are exposed to all, a second group are
exposed to none and then a series of other groups are exposed to
only one of the pollutants. You then follow their medical
histories over a period of several years.
Impossible to carry out of course so we have to rely on data
which has been collected from questionnaires and autopsies and
apocryphal stories.
How many people contract lung cancer who have never smoked and
never been exposed to smoke? We are never supplied with this
figure because that has not been of interest to any of our
researchers. In discussions statistics are bandied about as if
they are absolute and the definitive truth. When in fact they
are simply one persons interpretation of a set of data.. How
good that interpretation is depends upon how the data was
collected and we are never told that.
I am not suggesting that smoking or passive smoking is not
harmful but sitting in traffic jams cannot be too good for you
either. I just wish that the health lobby would stop trying to
shove their own agenda down my throat all the time because this
then gives the politicians an excuse to interfere in our daily
lives all the more with laws telling us what we cannot and can
do, and quite frankly I am fed up with their constant preaching
and interfering. It would seem that it has become a replacement
for religion, but instead of hell fire and damnation awaiting a
transgressor of fairly basic rules we now have fines and
political preaching. I use smoking as one example but there are
numerous others such as obesity which could have been used.
About the author:
David Andrew Smith is the owner of
http://www.wesparkle.co.uk a
cleaning services company which operates throughout the UK
