That doesn’t seem to square with what the link says. Results seem pretty comparable to America.
I thought I had already replied, but I guess I forgot to hit the submit button. I bought a Vizio Tablet Thursday, so I was deeply into Android for the last couple of days.
This is a different study and it comes to much different conclusions than the Mayo Clinic Study. They compare states that did put in smoking bans and states that didn’t . They didn’t find a statistically significant difference in the states that put bans in and the states that didn’t.** All** states saw declines whether they passed laws or not.
http://www.eufumo.com.br/publicacoes/Myocardial.pdf
I still think that there have been so many private bans on smoking, that passing more laws only has minimal impact. The trouble is there are a lot of organizations that are in the business of lobbying against smoking and they aren’t going to admit that there is minimal risk to non-smokers, since they would be out of work. Most of these organizations want a total prohibition on tobacco, but there isn’t enough support to pass such laws yet.
I was just reading this article today and it seems very relevant to this OP, although no one has posted in this discussion recently.
Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/8269/
Here is the Plos article by Dr John P. A. Ioannidis.
http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124
The ban compelled me and many of the regulars at my local to simply quit. My last cig was 4/04 - best decision I ever made.
And any reduction in premature deaths will be spread out over decades. Anybody that thinks it would cause a 50% decrease in the cardiac death rate in a year is quite credulous.
BTW, local what? In the United States, it usually refers to the local branch of a union. For instance, my father would refer to his UAW local.
Local typically refers to the pub closest to your house.
This is why I include my state in my profile. Many posts are hard to understand if the poster doesn’t identify where they are posting from. Your reference is cryptic to an American, especially when you don’t identify where you are posting from. If you identify yourself as an Englishman, then we can look it up in a slang dictionary.
Joel - did you notice that this study looked at death from acute myocardial infarction (heart attacks), as compared to findings in other areas that have passed smoking bans, which looked at hospital admissions for myocardial infarction? (the Mayo study found significant drops in both heart attacks and sudden cardiac death from all causes). So you’re comparing apples and oranges here. It seems to me that even if there isn’t a marked enough drop in heart attack deaths following smoking bans to be significant in comparison to non-ban communities, the repeated demonstration of markedly lower hospital admissions for MIs following institution of bans is encouraging for those who care about public health. Even if one doesn’t immediately die following an MI, you’d have to agree it’s a serious life-changing event with long-term repercussions.
A previous poster claimed that the Mayo study was funded by a pro-ban advocacy group. Anyone notice that the study Joel linked to was funded at least in part by the tobacco industry?
Dr. Ioannidis has made some valid points about limitations of published research, a lot of which boil down to the fact that doing good science is complicated and difficult, and researchers must adjust to new evidence when it becomes available. This is a lot different from simply dismissing unwelcome findings by saying “They wuz wrong before!” (which is what various cranks and woo advocates do, and is the type of behavior enabled by Freedman in his Atlantic article, as discussed here). It is also bizarre to point out that published research is unreliable because it may be overturned someday, justifying this conclusion with a link to…published research. :dubious:
My memories are a bit different. I don’t recall being able to reliably find a restaurant with a no-smoking section until the '90s (and it was relatively useless, given that tobacco smoke did not respect boundaries carved out in restaurants and other public places). It’s only in recent years that outright bans on smoking in public places have come into effect, and many communities still lack them. I have been involuntarily exposed to other people’s tobacco smoke for much of my life, so I’m not very sympathetic to their cries of discrimination now.
This doesn’t make sense. First, organizations set up solely to enact regulations against public smoking would gladly accept obsolescence once their task is completed. Secondly, for organizations like the American Heart Association, there is plenty of advocacy and research to support that doesn’t involve public smoking. They’re not going out of business anytime soon no matter what rear-guard actions and questionable research is published with the support of tobacco and liquor manufacturers (hint: the tide of research is heavily going against those who defend inflicting tobacco smoke on others in enclosed public places).
Did you read the OP? Admission and deaths were in same sentence.
The Mayo clinic looked at data from county with less than 200,000 people and did no comparisons, while the other study used many states.
The Mayo clinic used data from one area with a small population and did no comparisons with other areas.
You are afraid to actually address their arguments, so you use Ad Hominem attacks on the researchers and tar me with something another poster has said?
Reductio ad absurdum. You take something I didn’t say and ask me to defend it. You have a non-peer reviewed press release from the Mayo Clinic and it is contradicted by a published peer reviewed study that has already been published. If you can’t find a peer reviewed published version of the Mayo clinic report, then you don’t have a leg to stand on. From my experience their is often little resemblance between what is in the press release and what is in the paper. Frankly what is in the abstract of the paper often contradicts what is in the body of the paper.
Your memories are irrelevant, since I was talking about workplace smoking not restaurant smoking. Were you forced to work next to smokers for 40 hours a week? Maybe you should explain what restaurants you frequented that didn’t have non smoking areas and why you patronized them if you found the experience so unpleasant and dangerous.
You should also produce some peer reviewed studies that indicate that indicate that being with in 10 yards of someone that is smoking for couple of hours a actually is a measurable health risk.
You can’t actually be that naive. They will continue to advocate their policies as long as they have donors because that is how they make their living, which is the same reason that the people working for the tobacco companies are doing their jobs. Did the anti-saloon league disband when Prohibition passed? When local smoking bans pass, then they just shift their focus to bans on outdoor smoking or smoking when children are in the house or car or increasing the enforcement budgets with dedicated smoking cops and heavier penalties for violations. They are also putting in bans on **third hand **smoking.
As previously pointed out, the two studies were analyzing different parameters, thus cannot be compared directly. The study you cite comments on that, but tries to handwave away the data from numerous studies on hospital admissions for heart attacks, by saying it’s hard to figure how hospital admissions for heart attacks declined markedly after smoking bans went into effect, but deaths in their own analysis did not.
Thanks for the clarification, but what you said included this:
I recall matters quite differently, but apparently that is “irrelevant” because of your own memories. :rolleyes:
Here’s a link to the full Surgeon General’s report on secondhand smoke with scientific references, including the issue of whether there’s a level of exposure that can be deemed “safe” (there isn’t).
This is not a “he said, she said” issue. You have cited one tobacco industry-funded paper that had findings different from multiple previous ones, not to mention the Mayo report.
I’d still love to know how you’re confident relying on that one paper, when you previously cited Dr. Ioannidis’ work to justify the argument that we can’t rely on scientific research. How do you know yours isn’t the one that will be overturned eventually, rather than the half-dozen or so others that demonstrated positive health effects from smoking bans? 
But the Mayo clinic does talk cardiac deaths so it is valid to compare deaths to deaths. You ignore the basic thrust of the other report that smoking related deaths went down even in states that didn’t pass laws against smoking and by similar amounts. The Mayo Clinic press release didn’t do any control studies and just took a statistically insignificant area and used it to make wild claims about the significance of the smoking ban. They are basically falling into Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc fallacy.
I’m familiar with the surgeon general’s report. That section is just a restating of the Linear No Threshold Hypothesis. There is no evidence of harm at low levels of exposure to tobacco smoke, but they assume there must be harm. It is a statement of their religion, not of science. Keep in mind that the surgeon general’s reports aren’t peered reviewed and is often overtly political.
I’m curious about why you can’t name one restaurant that you frequented that didn’t have a non-smoking section during the eighties. Are you actually an American? Are you old enough to have gone out to restaurants.
From http://yourdoctorsorders.com
This website gives a pretty good synopsis of the woo regarding second hand smoke. And yes, it contains links to cites. Militant anti-smoke people won’t like it much.
“Militant anti-smoke people” are not likely to be overly impressed by a doc who does lap-band surgery for obesity for a living, but who fancies himself far better versed on the subject of secondhand smoke than the Surgeon General or the many qualified researchers and public health experts who agree with him.
You get an immediate flavor of the quality of Dr. Simpson’s arguments when he declares that since he’s never seen an autopsy report listing secondhand smoke as cause of death, it must not be one. As a pathologist who’s performed numerous autopsies, I can tell you that it doesn’t work that way. Pathologists often have cases where lung or other forms of cancer, chronic lung disease and severe cardiac disease leading to death occurred in heavy smokers, but we don’t list smoking as the cause of death, just as obesity, heavy drinking, risky sex or other factors that likely figured into the patient’s demise aren’t listed as causes of death either. And secondhand smoke exposure is much less likely than those other risk factors to be noted and quantified in a patient’s clinical history, so the pathologist may not even be aware of it.
After a highly selective reading of the minority literature on secondhand smoke, Dr. Simpson closes with the Galileo Gambit, a typical dodge employed by people whose arguments are bankrupt, but think crying persecution will save the day.
“In “reality”, taking up the mantle of Galileo requires not just that you are scorned by the establishment but also that you are correct. There is no necessary link between being perceived as wrong and actually being correct; usually if people perceive you to be wrong, you are wrong. However, the selective reporting of cases where people who were persecuted or ostracized for beliefs and ideas that later turned out to be valid has instilled a confidence in woo promoters and pseudoscientists that is difficult to shake. They really do forget the part where they have to prove themselves right in order to be like Galileo.”
I do suspect, though, that militant anti-smoking people might be quite comfortable with the ad hominem tactic, suggesting that a doctor who runs a fat clinic can’t possibly be qualified to make statements regarding any other subject.
Misquoting someone is also a tactic those with an agenda might use. The doctor didn’t say “that since he’s never seen an autopsy report listing secondhand smoke as cause of death, it must not be one.” He said that that fact gave him pause to do some actual thinking and to read the relevant literature for which he provides cites.
A very intelligent agenda-driven person might even resort to accusing someone who is seeking factual information of selectively choosing cites (which, it seems to me, is actually more likely to be done by those with an agenda than by those seeking facts) and the wonderfully subtle tactic of casually referring to the actual scientific research as “minority literature.”
I suggest that if the actual evidence of harm from secondhand smoke was as convincing as the the anti-smoking crowd would have us believe, they wouldn’t use such an abundance of questionable, misleading and deceptive methods.
More Ad Hominem attacks? Can you talk about anybody without questioning their motives.
BTW, the current Surgeon General did consulting work for Burger King and is overweight to boot. She doesn’t sound like a reliable source for health advice.
How does a Ad Hominem response feel like now?
A couple of you need to review basic debate fallacies. Questioning whether someone has the necessary qualifications to expound on a subject and giving examples of their mistaken reasoning cannot be dismissed as an ad hominem attack.
So you don’t think Dr. Simpson is selectively using citations (not to mention anecdotes and flawed personal reasoning) to bolster his agenda? (that’s a rather pitiful list of journal citations, by the way).
I refer Turble not only to the abundant scientific literature referenced in the Surgeon General’s report confirming hazards of secondhand smoke, but to the very paper JoelUpchurch cited, which concedes multiple previous reports of declining hospital admissions following institution of smoking bans. Try also reviewing summaries of the PubMed journal articles on secondhand smoke published in recent years to get an idea of percentage of physicians, researchers and public health experts who take seriously the hazards of secondhand smoke, and then discuss the legitimacy of referring to the relatively scant contributions of doubters as “the actual scientific research”. :dubious:
I have never seen a death certificate list cause of death as 2nd hand smoking.
Anyone?
When you refer to tobacco company funding, that is an ad hominem attack.
When you refer to lap-band surgery, that is an ad hominem attack.
But when areas that don’t change the laws get similar declines, the the results you mention are bogus. Frankly physicians aren’t qualified for these kinds of studies. They don’t have the statistical background or scientific training in general. Even actual scientists often make bad mistakes when it comes to statistical analysis.