very poor website
chefjeff said:
You couldn't have read the website....because you lied about what is there. Geez, it is so automatic with you? Just as my post on 6-27 revealed the lies told by others here, this post highlights your bias and dishonesty. Sorry, but that is the truth.
Seriously, the website you provide doesn't help the credibility of your case. Did you really take a critical eye to it? Their understanding of epidemiology & statistics is very rudimentary, skewed, and often just plain wrong (trust me, they're pretty liberal in their use of the term "Fact"). BTW, Russ was absolutely right when he said "this website says nothing about whether second hand smoke is harmful. All it does it give people the ability to totally discount the loads of research that says it is." I don't get your basis for calling him a liar on that one.
The website makes it sound like you should throw out every study if it doesn't meet every criterion they somehow chose to include. They list some good questions to ask about health studies, but they're totally wrong in saying you should discard every study that doesn't meet ALL of their standards. If you were to apply their standards to all scientific studies across the boards (not just SHS studies), you'd only be left with a tiny fraction as passing muster. The art of epidemiology is to weigh the strengths and weakness of a study and critically evaluate the results. Not to categorically reject all studies that don't meet an arbitrarily selected criterion.
Relative risk of less than 2.0 is meaningless?? Excuse me? So you're comfortable exposing yourself to something that's going to make you 10% more likely to develop the disease in question (RR=1.1)? 50% more likely (RR=1.5)? 99% more likely (RR=1.99)? Sorry, I don't like those odds. You're comfortable exposing your KIDS to those odds? A relative risk of 1.05 can be hugely significant, depending on the severity of the outcome and the reach of the exposure. And the consequences of SHS are bad enough, and exposures widespread enough, that it doesn't need to make you >2x as likely to get cancer in order to be significant.
Yes, case-control studies are, on the whole, more susceptible to bias than prospective cohort studies, but that hardly means that their results are automatically wrong. Yes, confounders are important and should never be ignored, but you can NEVER totally control for all confounding unless you're an omnipotent being. You experimentally and statistically control for as many confounders as you can, but to say that because you can't guarantee against all residual confounding, a study is meaningless, is basically to say the entirety of health research is meaningless.
Biologic plausibility? Um, sorry, but I think it's pretty damn plausible that breathing in second-hand smoke would lead to many of the same diseases as breathing in primary smoke, albeit at a lesser magnitude of risk. Oh, what was that I said? Lesser magnitude of risk? There's your dose-response that they ask for.
Meanwhile, they ignore other epidemiological standards like replicability (have the results of the study been replicated in other studies?). Probably because they find it more convenient to ignore the huge body of studies that, time and time again, support the conclusion that second-hand smoke is a serious risk factor for various cancers, heart disease, asthma, middle-ear infections, lung disease, sudden infant death syndrome, etc etc.
I have a background in public health (including epidemiology). My job is to help people quit smoking who want to quit. So yeah, I'm biased. I guess according to your website, you should totally discount what I have to say simply because I have an interest in the issue. It's easy to ignore mountains of evidence if you don't like the message. But the fact of the matter is: those who still claim that second-hand smoke isn't harmful are some combination of misinformed, naive, in denial, and/or disingenuous. Kind of like those who used to say smoking isn't bad for you.
I'm not versed in property rights, so I don't have much to say about that. Except that I think that if you're elevating property rights above the right to health and the right to not have one's health compromised by others, I think your priorities are seriously messed up. All your free-market ideas don't do anything for children exposed to second-hand smoke, who can't make a decision whether or not to "choose" to be exposed. And, while nice and idealistic, a totally free market devoid of all regulation clearly just doesn't work when it comes to promoting public health, at least with respect to second-hand smoke. Only government regulation has proven capable of that in a reasonable time-frame.
Andrew
D), then I hope it all works out for him.
