Why does the medical field know so little about vaping?
- Thread starter Marvin & Sennie
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That is my new motto!
Another issue is that the medical profession seem to give far too much credence to clinical trials paid for by manufacturers. Some of these are pure fantasy and nothing more.
It seems as if bent trials are the norm in the smoking cessation area of medicine. How they get past peer review for publication is a matter of speculation, but presumably money changes hands - no one with any kind of reputation would touch most of these with a barge pole. There are dozens of ways to create a bent trial that produces the results you want, and many of them can be applied even before the start, so they won't appear in the trial method definitions. For example 'drug washouts, 'placebo washouts', individual deselection, group deselection, perhaps even active placebos, and so on.
If there are any honest clinical trials of smoking cessation pharmacotherapies, they won't make very impressive reading. In some cases, though, the researchers seem to want to retain a semblance of honesty, although they appear blind to the obvious irony and humour imbued in their writhing and wriggling to hold on to the pharma shilling. I remember one trial that reported a 2% success rate for an NRT (with commendable honesty), then proceeded to describe the treatment as 'safe and effective'. Monty Python couldn't have done better. At least that report ended with a good giggle.
It seems as if bent trials are the norm in the smoking cessation area of medicine. How they get past peer review for publication is a matter of speculation, but presumably money changes hands - no one with any kind of reputation would touch most of these with a barge pole. There are dozens of ways to create a bent trial that produces the results you want, and many of them can be applied even before the start, so they won't appear in the trial method definitions. For example 'drug washouts, 'placebo washouts', individual deselection, group deselection, perhaps even active placebos, and so on.
If there are any honest clinical trials of smoking cessation pharmacotherapies, they won't make very impressive reading. In some cases, though, the researchers seem to want to retain a semblance of honesty, although they appear blind to the obvious irony and humour imbued in their writhing and wriggling to hold on to the pharma shilling. I remember one trial that reported a 2% success rate for an NRT (with commendable honesty), then proceeded to describe the treatment as 'safe and effective'. Monty Python couldn't have done better. At least that report ended with a good giggle.
I can only hope that you use your energy on opponents just as fierce as you do here where we are on the same team.
They are all just fighting for control because our addiction is padding their bank accounts. Once they lose the control of the flow of $, they will lose out on profits in the BAZILLIONS !!!
I completely understand that having smoked for over 30 years of my life and have wasted a lot of money on tobacco products, NRT's, and doctors trying to give me Chantix.
I'm sure she wasn't attacking you, just using your posts to make some points.
And as you can see, she is very passionate.
My job as an advocate and activist with CASAA is to educate people and expose the truth. I've been doing it for a while so I apologize if I come off a little strong.
It's essential that people who are on the same team also are educated and know the truth or we will be completely ineffective. It doesn't do vapers any good when people are out there putting all of their energy into fighting the wrong groups or not understanding the true mindset of the opposition. If people think that all it will take is to just convince the ANTZ that e-cigs are "safe" or that smokers are the ANTZ's "real" enemy and they should leave us alone, then they will continue to bang their heads against the wall in frustration when the bans, over regulation and excessive taxes keep coming. I'm not trying to attack you personally in any way and I sincerely apologize if you felt attacked. I know you mean well and your comments were just a common misunderstanding of the situation we are in. So, as DC2 pointed out, I take opportunities like this to try to get not only the OP but also anyone else reading the thread to benefit from the things we have learned from experience. I'm just hoping you and anyone else who reads these posts will see things from a different perspective and benefit from the facts we have uncovered over the past 3 years. I know it's a process - it took me several months of deep involvement to realize all of the implications. I only hope that maybe I can help shorten that process for some people.
I posted this comment in another thread. Maybe it'll help explain where I'm coming from a little better? (I apologize for self-quoting, lol.)
You may be just kidding, but there's a lot of truth in what you say. It's exactly this sort of engine that powers cultural sensibilities in a complex, mass-media drenched & commercially driven society.
+ 100%. This is heart of the issue, as articulately as I've ever heard it expressed. The notion that the right to vape has anything to do with "what clinical trials have shown" or involves "educating" people in positions of institutional and legislative authority is hopelessly skewed & naive. This is a human rights issue. Jim Crow didn't end because white bigots were "educated" about the fact that it was "safe" for people of different ethnicities to drink from the same drinking fountain.
The oppression of individual liberty (which to be assured involve much, much more than just smoking or vaping just look at the fact that the USA is far-&-away the world leader in per capita incarceration of its own citizens) needs to be seen for what it is, the rhetorical language that we use to describe it has to reflect our understanding of this, and effecting change must involve a sober assessment of how power actually functions in the society in which we live, as well as the recognition of a whole array of oppressive but established social templates that for the most part we can't even see because we have become more or less indoctrinated to them.
It's frightening that governments are interested in denormalizing non-criminal behaviors. In practice this amounts to persecuting people who irritate bureaucrats.
Public health and safety has become the go-to excuse for politicizing nearly everything. You have things like child safety seats, which are basically a wealth transfer program from middle-income American families to manufacturers of toddler equipment. You have the TSA harassing millions of average citizens per year. You have ordinances in NYC on the sizes of soda that you can buy. All of these inject politics into every-day life activities for the declared purpose of making things safe (or at least less harmful). It's the same dynamic we see at work with bureaucrats and lobbyists who fault vaping because they believe it threatens their efforts to denormalize smoking.
And heaven help the person who challenges any of hyperactive efforts to make everything safe. Those who question the level of government involvement in any safety-related areas are immediately treated as if they've declared that the government should have no role whatever in regulating medicine, restaurants, workplace safety, equal employment opportunity, banking, etc. This is fallacious reasoning that presents a false dichotomy aimed at shoring up the dogma that safety is a moral issue, and therefore it demands intervention.
Bertrand Russell said, "I should make it my object to teach thinking, not orthodoxy, or even heterodoxy. And I should absolutely never sacrifice intellect to the fancied interest of morals."
Public health and safety has become the go-to excuse for politicizing nearly everything. You have things like child safety seats, which are basically a wealth transfer program from middle-income American families to manufacturers of toddler equipment. You have the TSA harassing millions of average citizens per year. You have ordinances in NYC on the sizes of soda that you can buy. All of these inject politics into every-day life activities for the declared purpose of making things safe (or at least less harmful). It's the same dynamic we see at work with bureaucrats and lobbyists who fault vaping because they believe it threatens their efforts to denormalize smoking.
And heaven help the person who challenges any of hyperactive efforts to make everything safe. Those who question the level of government involvement in any safety-related areas are immediately treated as if they've declared that the government should have no role whatever in regulating medicine, restaurants, workplace safety, equal employment opportunity, banking, etc. This is fallacious reasoning that presents a false dichotomy aimed at shoring up the dogma that safety is a moral issue, and therefore it demands intervention.
Bertrand Russell said, "I should make it my object to teach thinking, not orthodoxy, or even heterodoxy. And I should absolutely never sacrifice intellect to the fancied interest of morals."
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This is well-said, but also needs to be seen as both a two-pronged fork and existing on a continuum. That which can be "denormalized" can much more easily be subsequently criminalized, and you really have two distinct issues: the issue of why I am not allowed to do something despite the fact that it's legal, but also the issue of why something is illegal when it's not inherently criminal. If one's only argument asserting the right to engage in a particular activity is that it's legal, then they can (and do) just change the law.
You mean like when they change the definition of smoking, for the purposes of smoking bans, so as to include electronic cigarettes?
LOL. Power can change the definition of, and then subsequently ban or mandate anything it wants. Every complex society has a mythos, or narrative pertaining to how it politically functions, and then there are the underlying mechanisms by which it really functions. The myth and the reality are inevitably disparate, at least to some degree. In the US, the myth is the democratic-republic model of representative government in which the "will of the people" is executed by proxy etc... The reality is something more akin to capitalist oligarchy in which power is purchased by the capital interests that can afford to purchase it, and public policy is shaped via the processes of determining how those interests can best be served. For ordinary people, this translates as a system of top-down control using both carrot and stick. That's just how it is, and neither you nor I can do anything about that.
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