despite the fear-mongering (similar to marijuana propaganda) by alleged “objective” health orgs like American Cancer Inst (which depends on funding from it’s scare tactics), the actual risks of smoking is overrated. If it was scientific fact that smoking actually cause cancer, then we would be seeing millions of smoking-related cancer(based on number of smoker), etc rather then the alleged (unproven) estimate of 200-400 thousand deaths, out of current smoking population of 35 million smoker; that works out to 1/2 of 1% chances of dying. When the general population was larger than that where smoking was everywhere and non-smokers ere exposed to second-hand smoke. such as 40-50’s, we still didn’t see millions of smoking relate deaths.
Sloan-Kettering used to have a risk calculator on its website. They took it down a few years ago and put up a screening calculator instead.
The old calculator said if you were age 60 and never smoked, your risk of getting lung cancer in the next 5 years was 2%. If you smoked a pack a day since you were 20, it was 3%.
And we should trust your analysis over trained statisticians because …? Not only are there very clear correlations between smoking and cancer, but smoking related cancers have shown a decline correlated with the reduction in smoking in the last few decades.
Your “we should be seeing millions of deaths” tells us you don’t understand what the status of knowledge is, but are arguing against your own personal interpretation of what “smoking causes cancer” means.
It’s like saying “walking into traffic isn’t dangerous” based on the fact that most people who walk into traffic are fine.
The archetypal study of the effect of smoking on mortality was started in 1951 by Doll & Hill. It was a prospective study of 34,000 male British doctors, and it continued for 50 years.
All the research papers are linked down the right hand side of that page.
The authors of the later studies are Doll & Peto. The 50-year update (published 2004) is found here:
The paper is accessible and non-technical, but you don’t even have to read it - just look at the survival curves that summarize the vast amount of data, showing non-smokers in red and smokers in blue.
Note in particular Fig 4, which shows what happens if you quit smoking. If you quit before ~40 years old, provided that you are not quitting because you are already sick, then your life expectancy is not much worse than someone who never smoked.
again, it’s risk factor, not cause and effect; going by guestimates (no names or actual empirical evidence), less than 1% of smoking population will die from smoking-related illness
If something is a risk factor, then by definition there’s a causal relationship. Cause and effect does not mean the effect must always follow the cause. It means the effect is more likely.
Again, complete nonsense. Your life expectancy as a smoker is 10 years shorter than a non-smoker, as stated in the massive study that I cited and quoted above.
By the same token, cyanide isn’t actually hazardous, as you could take a cyanide pill, but then shoot yourself in the head before the cyanide had a chance to have an effect.
You are completely correct in pointing out my misstatement of what a risk factor is.
However, in the case of smoking, obviously the numerous mechanisms of damage have been extensively studied, and the vast amount of research data involving huge sample sizes allows us to control for confounding variables. So we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is a causal relationship between smoking and disease, notwithstanding fedman’s desire to embrace Michael Palin’s optimism in the Parrot Sketch.