11 replies to this topic

[maineman]

Make your own choices. Live your own life as honestly as you can and make the right choices for you. Fuggedabout "everyone else" unless you have some way to help those who a) are in need of help and B) want your help. The first thing I ask a patient is "how can I help YOU?" and we take it from there. mm

[stocks]

What do these four “public health” problems—smoking, playing violent video games, overeating, and gambling—have in common? They’re all things that some people enjoy and other people condemn, attributing to them various bad effects. Sometimes these effects are medical, but they may also be psychological, behavioral, social, or financial. Calling the habits that supposedly lead to these consequences “public health” problems, “epidemics” that need to be controlled, equates choices with diseases, disguises moralizing as science, and casts meddling as medicine.

http://www.reason.co...how/119236.html

Puritanism disguised as science

Velvet Glove, Iron Fist, a book that points squarely to a recurring theme of the anti-smoking crusade: the ‘slippery slope’

You might think that governments have been a little illiberal on tobacco in recent years, but their illiberalism is nothing compared with the reaction of rulers centuries ago. In the first half of the seventeenth century, Snowdon writes, there were ‘draconian laws… to eliminate tobacco use from Sicily to China’. The czar of Russia flogged first offenders and had their nostrils slit; a second tobacco offence would result in execution. In China, the emperor Chongzhen ordered the beheading of tobacco importers. Shah Abbas of Persia punished both importers and users with death, while his son added the touch of executing them by pouring molten lead down their throats.

Tolstoy asked ‘Why do gamblers almost all smoke?’, along with ‘prostitutes and madmen’, while women who lead a ‘regular life’ avoid tobacco. Indeed, smoking has long been associated with those who are impulsive and less concerned with what people think of them.

While epidemics of ‘ill health’ are invented, real problems are often ignored. Shockingly, in 2007, only five per cent of the US National Cancer Institute’s funding was spent on studying lung cancer, despite the fact that it causes one-in-three cancer deaths in America. As far as the medical establishment is concerned, it seems that finding a treatment for lung cancer has taken a back seat to interventionist, smoker-bashing health campaigns.

http://www.spiked-on...s_article/7085/