Any sensible user of tobacco will of course lie about it today if asked by medical personnel. The Frankensteins are trying to figure this out for themselves. Even if your own doctor might be sane and decent, you and your medical file will come to the attention of Healthist insurance and referral agencies, so being honest with him, or with any technicians, researchers, or referral physicians, is just daft. In times past, many medical patients and research subjects would have glossed over their "vices," either by reflexively selective memory or by discreet intention, but at this point admitting tobacco use to Healthists is equivalent to proclaiming one’s proud Jewish heritage to empowered Nazis. Make no mistake about it. Healthists want smokers socially humiliated and eradicated. Smokers’ illnesses, pain, suffering, and death, are topics of smug satisfaction, and considerable mirth, at health center offices and lunch tables. If you have not personally worked with or sat with these Nazis, we can tell you, several of us at FORCES have done so and for years. We make no idle warning here.
Of course the Healthists have relied all along on patient and subject interviews to produce the "lifestyle epidemiology" (in point of fact eugenics) on which they base their hysterical and hypochondriacal beliefs (called "the truth"). The purblind statistical methods of eugenics could never provide real substantiation of anything. A hazard to overindulgence exists regarding many things but fanaticism took hold long ago in this arena. "The truth" (mad preconceptions) about tobacco would not be supported even if distant recalls of a subject’s own smoking or of the smoking of family members or co-workers were always honestly and accurately reported. Yet when it comes to questionnaire studies on medical conditions targeted as "related to tobacco," afflicted subjects know the preconceptions too, and in fact amongst these afflicted a "don’t blame me" reaction naturally leads to under-reporting of personal smoking, while over-reporting of "passive" smoking exposure is a natural "blame the other" response. These have always been the tendencies, and with every daily ratcheting of antitobacco fanaticism, they grow stronger. Many "lifestyle epidemiology" studies on disease, incidentally, make not even an attempt to adjust for this imponderable. Others have turned a deliberate blind eye to its very apparent and particular manifestations in their results.
Thus unreliability of responses exists particularly regarding afflicted subjects and generally regarding the population at large. The article linked with describes a recent attempt to decipher how much smokers in the general population lie to the health professions. Specifically it analyses responses to the third US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Through follow-up interviews and blood tests the researchers have estimated that, amongst various age groups, between six to twenty-five per cent of smokers denied their smoking. The young smokers were more likely to be honest than were the old. Age brings wisdom as we see. The researchers sidestepped the use of pipes, cigars, and chewing tobacco entirely, focussing only on cigarette use, and also admit that their methods could be reliable to ferret out habitual smokers, but not the more occasional cigarette puffers.
Another clear source of bias in this study — the more evasive type of person would likely avoid participation in the original NHNES, would also be less likely to submit to the secondary interviews of these researchers, and would be even more unlikely to submit to the blood test accompanying the secondary interview — is not discussed in the article. Of course the finding that smokers lie about their smoking has been demonstrated before and is intuitive at any rate. To what extent are smokers really lying to the Health Nazis? Certainly vastly more than the Reich itself is able to discern. Every smoker should be lying to the medical profession. We warn our readers very sincerely. It’s not that there are no decent people in the health field. There are an awful lot who vehemently hate people who smoke. They can mistreat you, they can hurt you, and they will.
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