I
did like this piece in a link
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/21/health/study-gives-e-cigarettes-edge-in-helping-smokers-quit.html
.... in the NYT article, on West:
Prof. Robert West, director of tobacco studies at University College London and senior author of the study, which is to be published Wednesday in the journal Addiction, said that clinical trials could not answer the question most people have about whether e-cigarettes help smokers quit because the devices are changing so fast that they become obsolete before an experiment ends.
What is more, he said, people who wanted e-cigarettes and found themselves put in a group that used, say, the patch, would just drop out.
“The medical model is great for cancer drugs, but it doesn’t really work for this situation because there’s nothing to stop participants in the patches group from just going out and buying an e-cigarette,” Professor West said
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What does that tell them?
Nothing, evidently, other than it screwed up their study since the desire for something like an ecigarette is more than the nicotine addiction. Vapor, imo, is 50% or more of the 'habit'.
And what a lame (but significant*) reply by Glantz:
Stanton A. Glantz, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, said the study’s limitation was that it tried to measure the effect of e-cigarette use only among smokers who were trying hard to quit, not all smokers.
*"significant" in the sense that Glantz is attempting to use similar (but not the same) wording as Zeller, in 'separating' two groups of smokers, in order to show a larger (net) group of smokers, to justify addressing the greater good - or public health - not just their 'area' but something that "appeals to the public" and hence easier to justify, or gain acceptance.
For Zeller, there are also two groups - the smaller group of 'hard core smokers' (where ecigs would be beneficial for them), and 'smokers who would quit', but dual use would continue the addiction and deter any reason to quit.
From HELP:
"But our job as the regulator is to figure out what is going on
at the population level and it includes the much larger group of smokers not like the first group I defined, a much larger group of smokers who are concerned about their health and who are interested in quitting and what happens instead of those people completely substituting with a non-combustible product, they start using both, and then along the way they wind up becoming less interested in quitting. So then we would say that might not be good for public health, and our job is to figure out what is the net of all of those possible behaviors including any initiation which would not be good for public health and then try to make public policy on top of that."
But Glantz said the study was no good because it only included 'those who were trying hard to quit, not
all smokers.' .... implying those trying hard to quit (NOT Zeller's "hard core smokers", but his 'net') was the 'smaller group' and 'all smokers' as the larger group.
One might think that they might get their groups straight
But they want it both ways, where "public health" represents the greater group even though they define the 'greater group' as opposites!! lol.
Well done!
