Keep Smoking
Carolina doctors say it’s better to keep smoking than use ecigs to quit
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by Dave Cross
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The road to practicing Family Medicine is a long one. Clare and Adam will have both attended university for four years to get a degree before joining medical school. They will have spent four more years there prior to obtaining their medicine degree. Then they will have spent between three and seven years in residency training. They will have done this with little to no income bar any loans and bursaries they managed to source. Clare and Adam have had to be dedicated to get where they are now.
So it’s good to know that their journal contribution states “Conflicts of interest: authors report none”. This means they a clearly beyond reproach when they say: “clinicians should not routinely recommend electronic nicotine delivery devices [ENDS], such as e-cigarettes, to their patients who smoke.” Nothing at all has influenced this opinion other than their careful consideration of the facts.
We know that they have considered the facts as they go on to say: “The wisdom of this evidenced-based recommendation stems from 4 key issues: inadequate safety, poor effectiveness, little regulation, and an ethical framework to do no harm.” Doctors should tell smokers who wish to quit using vape products to carry on smoking because of evidence-based stuff.
Conflicts of interest: authors report none.
The evidence they’ve considered has shown that “we lack strong evidence in regard to the safety of ENDS”. It also tells us “evidence exists about potential and real harms”. Vaping is not worth considering of being safer than smoking because “ENDS appear to deliver a similar number of particulate matter as cigarettes”. It continues in a blahblahblah fashion to include references to diacetyl and popcorn lung – which means you’ve probably drawn up a fair opinion as to the veracity of their proposition.
But then they stick the boot into vaping’s efficacy: “the effectiveness of ENDS as a smoking cessation aid is questionable at best, potentially ineffective at worst, and significantly poorer than existing FDA-approved optimal therapies, such as combined nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) or varenicline”.
Conflicts of interest: authors report none.
So, because vaping is not 100% safe and the authors are selecting to ignore data such as Farsalinos’ 6.1 million Europeans have quit smoking with the use of electronic cigarettes, smokers are better off continuing to smoke rather than adopt a product described as 95% safer.
Conflicts of interest: Michael Siegel reports one.
Hang on a second, what’s this? Michael Siegel writes that Goldstein, the lead author, has “received a $500,000 grant from Pfizer”. Pfizer make Chantix, a quit smoking product. “I think that a half million dollar grant from a corporation which stands to gain financially from the medical recommendation made in the article is something that readers deserve being made aware of.”
Is it any wonder that medical practitioners are confused about vaping?
Dave Cross
Journalist at POTVDave is a freelance writer; with articles on music, motorbikes, football, pop-science, vaping and tobacco harm reduction in Sounds, Melody Maker, UBG, AWoL, Bike, When Saturday Comes, Vape News Magazine, and syndicated across the Johnston Press group. He was published in an anthology of “Greatest Football Writing”, but still believes this was a mistake. Dave contributes sketches to comedy shows and used to co-host a radio sketch show. He’s worked with numerous start-ups to develop content for their websites.
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