1930 - first cigarette company uses physicians in their ads
1950s - evidence starts mounting that smoking causes lung cancer
1964 - US Surgeon General report on the link between smoking and cancer
1998 - cigarette companies still maintained that the link is controversial
(Are dairy and grains still food groups... I could easily go on)
I don't get it. Are you saying that grain shouldn't be a food group? I think for the purposes of categorizing foods, "starchy staples" is a pretty useful categorization, even if the recommendation to eat 8 servings a day or whatever is misguided.
Social Media consumption is another.
We never frikkin learn.
They were supported by the mainstream medical and science establishments. Rosemary Kennedy, JFKs relative got one.
People were giving labotomies to their kids to calm them down, advised by their doctor.
Great article on Howard Dulley one of the kids whose parents gave him a lobotomy advised by a doctor.
https://www.npr.org/2005/11/16/5014080/my-lobotomy-howard-du...
> He objects to going to bed but then sleeps well. He does a good deal of daydreaming and when asked about it he says 'I don't know.'
Doesn't this description fit most kids in the world? It was used to justify the lobotomy of a poor boy.
I'm curious if there were doctors and scientists who dissented from the cigarette consensus prior to the 60s? And how were they treated in such an environment?
There's a good record in "Research on Smoking and Lung Cancer: A Landmark in the History of Chronic Disease" (The Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine, 1989) [0]:
> By the 1930s, some evidence had been obtained that the incidence of lung cancer among males was increasing. The evidence came from three sources: official mortality statistics, pathologists' reports of autopsy findings, and the observations of physicians who specialized in the treatment of lung disease.
> Speculation about these factors continued, but there was also much criticism of the view that the reported increase in lung cancer was credible. . . . Factors which were listed as likely to be responsible for an artificial increase were better diagnosis of the disease and increased longevity of the population.
[0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2589239/pdf/yjb...
The tech industry is way ahead of any hint of regulations with regards to things like privacy, security or safety. New generations of people are brought unwillingly onto social media by parents. Some problems are hard to reel in by design.
Now imagine if that was the case here; That the big business and the scientific community had a natural alignment in promoting and protecting a practice with huge commercial interests...
>In 1930s Germany, scientific research for the first time revealed a connection between lung cancer and smoking, so the use of cigarettes and smoking was strongly discouraged by a heavy government sponsored anti-smoking campaign
>After the Second World War, the German research was effectively silenced due to perceived associations with Nazism
That's really interesting. I dug a little more into it[0]. Apparently the underlying reasoning was that the Nazis associated smoking with "degenerates" and damage to "bodily purity." So when the research hit the US, people must have associated anti-smoking with those Nazi ideas. I wonder if tobacco companies latched onto this momentum to keep their public image healthy?
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-tobacco_movement_in_Nazi_...
so nearly 3 generations.
Maybe lung cancer was 1950s, but health in general? Much, much earlier than that.
Come visit a developing country and you’ll find that wearing a seatbelt or drinking clean water is still not widely accepted. They have bigger problem right now.
When Pharmaceutical Companies Used Doctors to Push Opiates
When Pharmaceutical Companies Used Psychiatrists to Push Amphetamines
psychiatry in general is a pretty ridiculous field, at least as practiced here in the US. just yesterday I had my every-three-months checkup where I basically tell my psychiatrist everything is still going good, so can I have three more months' prescriptions of the thing you got me dependent on when I was a teenager, please. I was making some small talk about my life as per usual, talking about how work has been a bit stressful but that I've noticed I've become much better at handling work-related anxiety, compared to in the past, and she asked if I wanted to try any kind of prescription to help with it. it seems like the whole job is basically listening to people with issues and prescribing them pills to attempt to fix the problem. if a prescribed pill doesn't do anything after a certain amount of time, or has negative unintended effects, then oh shit stop taking it, let's try something else instead... another pill, of course, not any kind of counseling or literally any other kind of treatment at all, just more pills.
> Colleen McBride, director of the cancer prevention, detection and control program at Duke University Medical Center... says there is a growing body of evidence that nicotine actually relieves some symptoms of Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease, and appears to help those with severe depression focus.
https://today.duke.edu/2001/08/mm_medicaluses.html
The question is, to what extent are current medical uses of such substances actually necessary, i.e. to what extent has it all been about getting those sales numbers up?
On another note, I was prescribed a medicine 20 years ago called Propulsid. When I went to fill the prescription, the pharmacist told me that he would not recommend I take it. I contacted the doctor and he was pissed that the pharmacist had given me that recommendation. In the end I didn't take it, which is a good thing because it was removed from the market several years later for causing heart issues.
>WARNING
>Serious cardiac arrhythmias including ventricular tachycardia, ventricular fibrillation, torsades de pointes, and QT prolongation have been reported in patients taking cisapride.
It’s fine to question individual doctors.
It’s fine to question corporate-sponsored think tanks.
Is it fine to question a scientific consensus on effective ways to fight a global pandemic?
Yes, it is always fine to question scientific conclusions with legitimate concerns.
Or we could always revert to letting the church decide what valid science is, I guess.
In low-context, short form meme warfare with the only intention of spreading an opinion that the consensus believes is both incorrect and detrimental? Absolutely not. That's what you're doing right now. Knock it off.
So without being able to reasonably comfortably speak against a scientific consensus you end up with neither science nor a consensus.
If it cannot be questioned, is there really a consensus?
Money and fear of losing money has infected almost every profession and business lately, especially due to the pandemic. Even online reviews and advice are hit or miss and even fabricated completely. Getting a second opinions and asking my elders (65+) questions have served me better so far in life than just outright trusting what random professionals on the Internet and TV regularly tell me. I am vaxxed mind you, enough facts were there and I'm pretty reasonable.
Pill interactions are also a big big issue... A doctor sees each patient for maybe an hour, its important to be able to make sure you also feel comfortable with following their advice (live or die) of course.
About 1) the solution for the FDA has been to ban flavorings, under the "think about the children" idea. While the risk of childen getting addicted to nicotine could be a concern, given the lack of measured risk, it could be as innocent as enjoying beer. About 2), nicotine seem to have negative effects on arteries and the skin mostly, causing premature aging (increase elastases and metalloproteases).
We may have more data in a generation or two, but it would be advisable to plan on reducing your use of e-cigs.
We know lungs are very sensitive and easily accumulate shit in them. Therefore the reasonable position is to assume that anything you point into your lungs is harmful, unless you have extremely strong evidence that it's not (as opposed to assume that something is safe until evidence that it's not.)
So: assume that e-cigs will give you lung cancer.
Really making good use of that global network we got goin' here, history.com.
edit: https://archive.is/aAf3K
... Of course, that's the thing about science. The people doing research are separate from the ones providing the money. And people will put money behind the research that they believe is correct. This does, of course, incentivize some unethical folks to fudge numbers, but in general, the right way to approach this is to separate the funding from the science. See what the science says. Then, if you see an outlier paper and you need to understand why it's so different from the consensus... It might be helpful to see who is funding it to understand.
Going the other way (discounting the science based on who is funding it) is forming theories without data.
s/they believe is correct/the narrative of which benefits them.
Unfortunately it's hard to separate funding from the science. What can one do? Ban privately funded research? Force funders of a study to fund another attempting to find contrary results/pick it apart?
While I agree that some source of funding doesn't automatically invalidate a study, but anecdotally (and probably empirically), studies surprisingly often agree with the people who fund them.
That's not a bad idea. The national counter-research unit. Any privately funded research is taxed at some percentage and all proceedings go to debunking that very research!
The fair thing to wonder about is what things are we doing today that will seem ridiculous and obviously harmful to people in 100 years from now. Staring at a bright flat screen hours a day just to interact with a random stranger who vehemently disagrees with you about petty subjects?
Edit: here it is https://web.archive.org/web/20220120011739/https://www.histo...
The tobacco industry paid doctors to become outliers and promoted them to imply expert consensus and push their product.
People not very fond of vaccines also promote outliers attempting to imply some form of consensus or at least scientific validity. Quite a few of them also have products or a whole world view to sell (which often includes buying specific products).
That is a bit of an upside down view of the power structure in society. Pharmaceutical companies are literally making hundreds of billions of dollars off of their products. These companies are not exactly innocent. They have very little morals and are generally okay with mass suffering as long as their profits are increasing (look at the opioid epidemic as an example).
If anything, I think it is much more likely that the reverse is happening. The scientists, doctors, etc. are designing studies in a way to paint a more favorable view of the products that they are looking at. They are cherry picking data to show that they are good while ignoring any data to the contrary. It looks a lot more like they are in the pocket of Big Pharma to me.
In addition, there is a social stigma where if you take an unpopular view here, you will likely be seen as a “conspiracy theorist”, or face the possibility of losing your job, friends, family members.
Most of the people against Big Pharma promote living a healthy lifestyle, taking supplements, going outside, getting sunlight, eating well, exercising, etc. It is not like they are trying to sell you some expensive products.
When governments all around the world are providing billions of taxpayer money to pharmaceutical companies who have legal indemnity and can’t be sued if people have adverse reactions to their products, and those same governments are forcing their citizens to take the products (often against their will) in order to be allowed to participate in society, it is probably time to start questioning who the “good guys” really are here.
They were called heroes.
Today, none of that apparently matters, valuable medical staff were fired anyway, in a middle of pandemic. Why???
Only to turn around, and demand that the vaccinated, but COVID-positive workers (who'd normally have to isolate) work the COVID wards instead?
Couldn't they just ask those that declined vaccination, but previously infected with COVID, work in those wards?
They've done that in 2020, and if they are willing to do that again, are they not heroes, risking their own lives to save others? Well, suddenly they are now pariahs instead of heroes, and must be fired and ridiclued.
How does any of this make sense???
I'm lost at this point.
Definitely. I must confess that I am much more familiar with the situation in Germany, where the commercial entanglement of doctors and pharma companies may be much weaker. We do have a lot of Anti-Vax propaganda, however, which I follow somewhat, so I do know their ways. From what I know they are similar (if not more radicalized) than their counter parts in the US.
> Pharmaceutical companies are literally making hundreds of billions of dollars off of their products. These companies are not exactly innocent. They have very little morals and are generally okay with mass suffering as long as their profits are increasing (look at the opioid epidemic as an example).
I agree! They must be tightly controlled. They're not all evil, though. Like most companies they also have some utility to society: They produce medicine that clearly works, in some cases even remarkably well (sure, arguably at inflated prices). This is the case with vaccines.
> In addition, there is a social stigma where if you take an unpopular view here, you will likely be seen as a “conspiracy theorist”, or face the possibility of losing your job, friends, family members.
I try not to do this, but you're right. Sometimes it's a bit hard because the stereotype is often true. I do have an anti-(corona)vaccine friend and while I think her considerations are irrational here, it's not like she's malicious herself. Especially when wanting to convince her of my changing her mind, there's nothing good not treating her respectfully will do.
> Most of the people against Big Pharma promote living a healthy lifestyle, taking supplements, going outside, getting sunlight, eating well, exercising, etc.
This is where things get hairy. Going outside, getting sunlight, eating well and exercising are all fabulous things and I am all for promoting them.
The issue begins to appear when you insinuate that these can be better than a proven treatment for a given sickness, like telling people to just take more walks outside and the cancer will solve itself. That is what harms people. And it's something a large portion of people in this bubble definitely do. That is where the issue lies.
> It is not like they are trying to sell you some expensive products.
Many influencers out of this bubble absolutely are, especially regarding the supplements you previously mentioned (plus some weird devices, sculptures, things with magnets ...). They can contain nothing of much value and just be ineffective at curing illnesses, leading to people not seeking real treatment and wasting their money, they can also be actively harmful, see "Miracle Mineral Solution", which contains literal bleach [0]. That is doubly harmful and absolutely to be fought. These people are enriching themselves from gullible people by telling them fantasy stories and it is highly despicable.
------
Of course there's a spectrum. Not everyone who as safety concerns about the vaccines automatically believes in wild conspiracy theories. However the seed of "look at what shady things people up there are doing" can often grow into "all the system is evil and we must fight it with fire" and that's what I'm afraid of. That this radicalization frequently happens is at least supported ancedotally (I have been in that loop for a short while myself) and why I'm so passionate about this topic.
Real conspiracies exist! But please use your critical thinking skills to evaluate the evidence and likelihoods of things.
End of rant, I guess.
This is literally the only comment chain in the entire thread to reference vaccines
still a shitty habit to pick up though
(Not actually kidding)
smoking was cool back then. it was a social thing to do. you can see that in old Hollywood movies.
FTFY.
Abbott and Costello were sponsored by Camel. C-AM-EL-s
C for Comedy
A for Abbott
M for Maxwell
E for Ennis
and L for Lou Costello, put them together and they spell, CAMEL!
https://otrr.org/hotrod/hotrod7.html for episodes.
> Marijuana also affects brain development. When people begin using marijuana as teenagers, the drug may impair thinking, memory, and learning functions and affect how the brain builds connections between the areas necessary for these functions. Researchers are still studying how long marijuana's effects last and whether some changes may be permanent. Long-term marijuana use has been linked to mental illness in some people, such as: temporary hallucinations, temporary paranoia, worsening symptoms in patients with schizophrenia ...
Source: https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/drugfacts/marijuana
