Small world .... I'm not a right-wing nut job, and I too firmly believe in personal responsibility.
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Realtively new pet peeve: Health care professionals who are unwilling or unable to separate the findings of scientific studies of the effects of smoking from the findings of scientific studies of the effects of nicotine when delivered to the human body through vaping.
Why is this a pet peeve? Simple, really. Because the ignorance of these misguided and woefully intellectually uncurious individuals kills people.
My cardiologist is thrilled that I'm no longer smoking, and his only objection is what I already know; that nicotine slightly elevates blood pressure and heart rate. Last time my BP was measured it was 118/80 (I did vape lightly that morning), so I have determined for myself that the benefits outweigh the risks. I consider nicotine to be about as harmful as caffeine, and those are my two recreational drugs. And it seems to me that the many, many doctors who currently prescribe nicotine for a variety of beneficial purposes - memory improvement, management of ADHD and depression, and delaying the onset of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's among them - have also determined that the benefits can significantly outweigh the risks.
I just asked another health care professional if he would rather see a patient of his smoking cigarettes, or vaping. His answer was a very unsatisfactory "neither". He had managed to quit smoking, so evidently thought that everyone else should just do the same. I invited him to rejoin the real world at his leisure.
He then told me that nicotine permanently damages blood vessels because of nicotinic acid and nitric oxide. I researched both and found that nicotinic acid is niacin (Vitamin B3), which is commonly used to lower "bad" cholesterol and raise "good" cholesterol, and that nitric oxide results from the acetlyaldehyde in tobacco smoke, not from nicotine.
Ignorance kills. Vaping doesn't.