THE TRUTH ABOUT LUNG CANCER RATES
From: David
To: <forum@forces.org>
Subject: Lung Cancer
Date: Jan. 24, 2006
Hello there,
May I begin by applauding you
for such an illuminating - indeed quite breathtaking - website, or rather
the information therein. I never realised the scale of misinformation and
exaggeration the public health machine has fed the public about smoking.
Thank you for bringing it to my attention - I stumbled over it and as a
smoker I must say you have cheered me up no end!
SInce finding your site I have
since expored other sites such as FOREST here
in the UK. I have a query that I
first directed to FOREST and my correspondent admitted uncertainty about the
answer. I wonder if you could clear this up? Here it is:
In Joe Jackson's article (with
which I am sure you are familiar), The Smoking Issue, he talks about the
studies of Sir Richard Doll "...who reckoned that 166 in 100,000 smokers die
from lung cancer, as opposed to 7 in 100,000 nonsmokers...". The smoker's
risk here is a mere 0.166%
Elsewhere in FOREST's website
they make this quote:
"According to Professor Sir
Richard Doll (the man who first discovered a correlation between smoking and
lung cancer in the 1950s) research suggests that if you start smoking as a
teenager and quit aged 30, the risk of developing lung cancer is 2%; give up
at 50 and the risk goes up to 8%; give up at 70 (by which time you have been
smoking for more than 50 years) and the risk rises to 16%."
Now, whilst 2% or 8% or 16% at
these ages are considerably safer than one might have previously expected,
they are still considerably higher than 0.166%.
My query is: why these
differences and what is the truth about lung cancer rates?
My reason for asking is not so I
can make myself feel safer about smoking, but is so that I can be
well-informed when I go around telling all my friends, smokers and
non-smokers, about how we have been hoodwinked
Hope you can help. Many thanks.
David Wheeler
Hello David,
Nice to meet you. This is Gian Turci from Italy. Your query was routed
to me. Let’s get to the figures first. The increment of risk by primary
smoking has been the object of enormous epidemiological research.
Several major studies indicate that the Relative Risk for primary
smoking can be as high as 10. That means 10 times more chances to get
lung cancer than non-smokers. Impressive indeed. Of course, the RR
changes with every single study. That is to say that there is no fixed
risk increment so, depending on which researcher and which study, you
will see different figures.
The problem to address here is not the figures but the methodology.
Epidemiology is largely junk science in various degrees of gravity: from
a mostly reliable monofactorial epidemiology (i.e., that concerning
polio, where variations of a fraction of decimal point can be accurately
traced), to the multifactorial stuff that you hear about smoking,
environment, and so on. Keeping in mind that we don’t even know whether
the origin of cancer is toxic, viral, mycotic or genetic and that, for
lung cancer alone, there are
over 40 suspected causes of which smoking may be one, it becomes
intuitive enough that it is impossible for any person, in any realistic
circumstance and in all cases to establish if the cancer was caused by
smoking or by any other single cause or group of causes. It is also
always impossible to figure the contribution of one cause to the
examined disease for any person. It is only possible to examine masses
of people and compare them with other masses of people.
Also, we must always keep in mind that epidemiology is statistics,
and statistics is not science. For that reason, it is firmly
established by definition that epidemiology cannot establish
causality, in spite of what you hear from corrupt or incompetent
media and “authorities”. This is because experimental science is not
involved, and because all these statistics are based on questionnaires:
simple lifestyle questions to people whose answers are taken as true
because there is no way to check what they say.
The fact that smokers, statistically, suffer from lung cancer in grater
quantity than non smokers is absolutely no scientific proof that smoking
causes lung cancer (or any other cancer), for the smokers examined could
have been involved with, or exposed to, all kind of different/greater
risk factors than the non smokers examined: socio-economic status,
alcohol, workplace, etc. Rich people are said to smoke less than poor
people, thus they have less cancer. But the “thus” here is a very
false logic, for rich people feed themselves better, have more
comfortable and safer lives in general, get better medical care, and so
on. Yes, they say there are mechanisms (adjustments) that can be used to
correct for those factors but, although mathematically correct, they are
only based on speculative premises.
“The causal significance of an association is a matter of judgement
which goes beyond any statement of statistical probability”, said
the US Surgeon General when presenting the first report on
smoking-and-cancer (which has become an inseparable binomial in the
mouths of people) in 1964. In short, the “causal link” between smoking
and cancer is nothing but an opinion that is not
based on science, and is expressed by a chorus of people who are bound
together by very strong common interests of all kind, and this
opinion is represented as science and has been manipulated into a
culture to dodge scientific scrutiny – but there is still no
scientific proof whatsoever that smoking causes cancer. To hide this
reality, epidemiology has been elevated to the rank of science in the
public perception by dishonest researchers and health authorities backed
by media.
The base problem with multifactorial epidemiology in general is that,
even when the risk increment is large (big RR), the researchers do
not know what they have measured (and that ranges from Mr. Unknown
to Sir Richard Doll) – and that makes epidemiology real junk science,
and vastly useless for any serious scientific intent and purpose.
In the case of passive smoking there are two further aggravations: the
questionnaires are all retrospective – that is,
they ask people to remember what they did 30, 40 years earlier –
often even remember what their grandfathers did! Furthermore, the junk
studies say clearly that the cause of the modest risk elevation cannot
be determined, for their RR are only 1.2-1.3 (20-30% statistical
increment of risk), whilst the rules of epidemiology itself demand that
the risk increment be of at least 200% to begin to suspect that
the increment may be due to the factor examined. Finally,
more than half of the studies are statistically insignificant
– that is, they show at the same time that exposure to passive
smoke could do you bad and do you good.
We have therefore an additional and serious social problem:
institutional corruption. Health “authorities” of all kind
knowingly lie about the risks of passive smoke. How can we be
certain? The reasons: 1) all studies on passive smoke are
veritable statistical rubbish without any value regardless of what
they show; 2) the rubbish DOES NOT even say that any danger exists. The
"authorities" believe that the passive smoke fraud and the ensuing
prohibition to smoke in public places “helps” smokers to quit, thus
saving them from “smoking-related” diseases the causes of which those
“authorities” cannot scientifically demonstrate, not even for one case.
If such false reports were issued by the Ministry of Finance on public
funds, or by the Ministry of Defence on weapons, those ministries would
get crucified by public opinion and governments would fall, sometimes
just on the base of suspicion. But if the false reports on passive and
active smoking come from the Ministry of Health, then that is just fine,
because the ministry does it “for our own good”, “everybody knows”
(how?) “that smoking is bad for you”, and because people have been
conditioned to hate smoking and smokers by relentless campaigns -
thus they emotionally choose to overlook the fraud even when it
is thrown in their face. The huge social problem antismokers have
created concerns politics, society and culture – not health – and
this social cancer is now expanding to a vast number of other areas,
enriching and empowering dishonest people whilst diverting billions from
public funds to their organizations and policies. But it all started
with epidemiology on smoking.
David, this is, in a nutshell, >>ALL<< the “science” there is behind the
Great Antismoking Fraud. The classic “rivers of ink” have been poured
into this crusade for several decades and - perhaps for that reason -
people are dazzled by the information overflow, thus they blindly turn
to the “authorities” for three-word slogans that say it all.
Unfortunately, those slogans are untrue - but isn’t dazzling people the
fine art of any good prestidigitator?
Regards,
Gian Turci
FORCES International
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