The myth of the smoking ban "miracle." I knew it was BS!

Just as a probably necessary caveat - these comments relate solely to the claimed reduction in heart attacks caused by the banning of smoking in public places and the junk science behind them, NOT to the relationship between smoking and various illnesses, which in my view is as rock solid as can be expected. Good grief. I mean really, just how stupid and credulous are people? These stories always had bullshit written across them in big neon capital letters. And still they have been repeated right around the world without a single syllable of doubt or questioning. Gee mainstream media, thanks for nothing yet again! (Honestly, there are times when you are worse than useless.) The proposition that measures such as simply banning smoking in public places - note carefully here, we're not talking about a measured reduction in the rate of smoking itself - could virtually immediately be responsible for a pronounced drop in the rate of heart attacks should have been immediately seen as highly suspect and dodgy. But at least there are people in the "new media" who aren't stupid and who can think logically and dispassionately. Spiked Online does what the old media singularly failed to do, that is, actually look for what evidence supposedly supported the breathless claims. Guess what? There basically isn't any. Who would have thought? Oh, as ever, there are "studies" that claim to show such results. But as anyone who isn't scientifically illiterate knows, there are studies and then there are studies. Some are well conducted with strong and robust findings, some are just simply pseudo-scientific junk. The "evidence" that banning smoking in public places reduces heart attacks definitely falls into the latter category. The Spiked Online article gives a good insight into how all too much "research" in matters related to health is designed to produce a predetermined "right" result so that the "right" message can be sent. If the immediate statistics for heart attacks following the banning of smoking in the work place or where ever show an increase in heart attacks, just ignore it! Or cut out older people, who are inconsiderate enough to be more likely to have heart attacks and thus wreck the results you are trying to achieve Or try and argue that passive smoking is more dangerous than actually smoking! No, don't laugh, this is in effect what has seriously been suggested by various health campaigners. Flawed though it may have been, the Helena research was followed by several studies that displayed such a cavalier approach to the scientific process that they bordered on the comical. Researchers in Bowling Green, Ohio, for example, saw a large rise in heart attacks during the first year of the smoking ban. Side-stepping this awkward fact, they simply redefined year two of the ban as the ‘real’ post-ban period and, since that year followed an abnormal peak, there was naturally a decline in the heart attack rate. As a consequence, the researchers could triumphantly declare that the smoking ban had led to a 47 per cent reduction in heart attacks. In the Piedmont region of Italy, there was an inconvenient rise in heart attacks amongst those over the age of 60 after the ban, and so those people were simply ignored. In a study that was trailed by the BBC (‘Smoking ban reduces heart risk’), the researchers focused entirely on those under 60, thereby recording an 11 per cent drop in cases. Studies such as these form the basis for the recent reports of smoking bans slashing heart attacks by ‘up to a third’. Now these all tend to be small scale regional studies. What happens when somebody does a large scale national study? The paper does not, however, include a mammoth (published) study of the entire United States, which concluded: ‘In contrast with smaller regional studies, we find that workplace bans are not associated with statistically significant short-term declines in mortality or hospital admissions for myocardial infarction or other diseases.’ Nor does it include an (unpublished) paper which found no statistically significant fall in heart attacks amongst the entire populations of California, Florida, New York and Oregon. Also, in relation to the most recent nonsense swallowed so naively and gullibly by the media, Spiked makes the simple point that if any journalist had just bothered to check the statistics for acute myocardial infarction before and after the smoking bans of England, Scotland and Wales they "would see that smokefree legislation has had no tangible influence on heart attack rates at all." But unfortunately these days journalism has been replaced with churnalism. Newspapers and TV stations don't investigate stories anymore, they simply want to get "news" pumped out onto their websites as quickly as possible. So any press release received is just repackaged as required and posted or printed with the least delay. Job done. No thought needed. Simple and cheap. That it is also a failure to do journalism properly and a betrayal of their readers' or viewers' trust does not appear to matter.

Posted via email from Garth's posterous