Uncertainty.

Today’s Mail antismoker story is that every smoking woman is to get bigger lumps inside their chests than outside (for some women I know, that wouldn’t really be possible). The headline screams “Lung cancer rates soaring for women after tobacco manufacturers target them by saying smoking helps you stay slim“.

The argument that Big Tobacco is still promoting smoking as a diet aid is slimmer than a More that’s been cut in half lengthways and re-rolled into two. Tobacco company advertising has been utterly deleted from existence. So the mere existence of thin cigarettes make women think they’ll get slim if they smoke them? If any readers are that dim, I suggest you smoke toothpicks instead. I doubt any readers here are that dim, since you’re operating a computer for something other than games and porn. The real agenda is, as Junican has often pointed out, to gain control of the size of the cigarette and to make it progressively smaller. This will have no effect on those of us who roll up, we can still put two ounces of tobacco in a page of the Times and roll it. Did it once with some friends, but it was the Glasgow Herald, not the Times. I know it’s hard to believe but I’m afraid we were very, very drunk. Put it this way – there was no ‘morning after’ because we were still going when the sun came up. Ah, the joys of youth, and of the days when tobacco wasn’t so Government-hated and was cheaper.

Despite the definite It Is Happening Now tone of the headline, the article says:

Researchers from Kings College, London, predict that within the next 30 years the number of women with lung cancer will more than treble, up from 26,000 to 95,000 in 2040.

In 30 years these ‘experts’ will all have retired, so 30 years is a nice safe distance away and they don’t need to worry about being sacked if it doesn’t happen. If they had gone for ‘doubled’ they might still be working when the date arrived. Rule of thumb: check the age of the researcher and if the prediction is past their retirement age, they don’t really believe it. It’s just a way to keep their project funded for the rest of their career. Sorting out the mess will be someone else’s problem.

Lung cancer rates are indeed increasing, while smoking is in decline. There is very little proper research into lung cancer and if you’re a nonsmoker and you turn up at your doctor’s with a persistent cough, he is most unlikely to think to test you for lung cancer. Why? Because the antismoker brigade have linked smoking with lung cancer so tightly that now, only smoking causes lung cancer and all smokers die of it. Many of the dim believe this absolutely.

The truth is a little different. The truth is that there are several kinds of lung cancer, including types that cannot have been caused by smoking, and that smoking might increase your risk of lung cancer but not actually by very much in real terms. Oh, and smokers can also get non-smoking-related lung cancers which will be registered as smoking-related because they smoke. This further messes up the statistics and holds back real research.

There is, as I said, very little research into lung cancer. As indeed the article also says:

But campaigners warn that not enough funding is being put towards better diagnosis methods and treatment.

It receives a quarter of the amount dedicated to breast cancer even though it claims more than three times as many lives.

The reason there is so little research is that the antismokers won’t allow it. They know there are many other causes of lung cancer, they know that smoking isn’t really the one and only cause, but they don’t want the public to know. Anyone trying to take a neutral or even non-hate stance won’t get funded. Start your project with the conclusion that ‘it’s all down to smoking’ and you’ll get the grant.  Include the words ‘and possible other causes’ and you won’t. Smoking causes everything. It even makes you go blind. The drones will believe that a smoker cannot smell, taste or see. Excellent. Let them rack their brains trying to figure out who stole their bacon sandwich. Couldn’t have been me, I’m a smoker. I didn’t even know it was there.

Even the ‘smoking-related’ cancers might not all be tobacco-smoking-related. There is now so much crap in the air that we really should all go around with HEPA filters over our faces. Aside from inhaling traffic fumes, incinerator smoke, and little bits of dead human floating out of crematoria chimneys, there have been over two thousand nuclear bomb tests on this planet. They have taken place pretty much all over it. And they started in the 1940s. Stick that in your stats and smoke it.

They won’t. The increased research funding they are bleating for is for more antismoker propaganda. Inhale the isotope, it’s good for you. Breathe deeply of the healthy diesel. What’s that? A bit of burning leaf? You’re going to die! Then you’ll go blind and deaf and mute and your willy will drop off (for women smokers, it’ll heal up). You’ll get worms and lice and giant mutant toads will poke you with mouldy oyster shells while you sleep. Aliens will take you away and ram barbed probes into all the places you especially don’t want them to go. Your children will turn green and furry and smell of old ladies’ saggy and rarely-changed underwear (Brown, with ‘February’ written on them). All your friends will spontaneously combust and then haunt your ashtrays. Expect to see all of the above in a serious press release from ASH any day now. They’ve come up with less sensible things in the past.

There should be much more research into lung cancer. It is, after all, genuinely on the rise while smoking is on the decline. Just like a lot of other respiratory problems. However, it has to be proper research for once. No prewritten conclusions as a prerequisite of funding. No selection of researchers based on how high up the ‘I hate smokers’ scale they can get. Proper, unbiased research into the real causes, no defensive ‘Oh but of course smoking is the main cause’ soundbites even when discussing something smoking can’t possibly have caused (is there anything left?). I honestly expect, any day now, to hear some ‘expert’ proclaim that Martians and dinosaurs smoked, and that’s why there aren’t any left alive.

If the antismokers had not pushed their agenda so hard, a lot of nonsmoking lung cancer patients would have been diagnosed much earlier and survived,  and we’d know an awful lot more about the other causes by now.

I’m lucky to be a smoker. If I go to the doctor with a bit of a cough, he’ll have me in front of an X-ray machine before I can light another one. If I ever get lung cancer I’ll be diagnosed the same day and have it hacked out before it has time to make itself at home. I don’t care how much it costs the NHS. I’ve already paid for that treatment. Many times over. So all those ‘ooo, I don’t want my taxes to  pay for your horrible habit’ people can go and slide an ungreased fishhook into their anal passages then pull it out at speed. You are not paying. I already have. In fact I have paid for your sniffles and trivial whining complaints as well as my own possible future treatments for a proper disease and if you still want to bleat, carry on, you can do it while you watch me not care.

If I was a nonsmoker with a persistent cough, when the doctor asked if I smoked I’d say ‘yes’ and I’d have stained my fingers with turmeric for effect. Otherwise he’d fob me off with a bottle of Covonia and a plastic spoon. That is not a joke. It really happens.

Science does not simply include uncertainty. Science is uncertainty. Nothing is fixed, real science is never settled. If I test a 25g sample of food for Salmonella and I don’t find any, I do not report ‘there is no Salmonella contamination’. I report ‘Not detected in 25g’ – I didn’t find any in the sample I tested. I do not guarantee that it’s not in any of the rest of the food, I don’t even guarantee that there wasn’t one single bacterium that might have failed to grow in the sample I tested. If I were to test it all there’d be nothing left to eat. The result does tell you that there aren’t likely to be very many, if any, so it’s safe to eat because you’d have to take in a good dose of Salmonella all at once to get infected. If it’s not found in 25g, you’d have to eat about 25 kg of that food at one sitting to stand any chance at all of an infection and if you did that, you’d have bigger problems than the shits.

Currently accepted theory is that the Moon formed from debris when something hit the Earth. ‘Currently accepted theory’ means ‘based on the information we have at the moment, that’s the most likely conclusion’. It does not mean ‘This is so, now and forever’. Science does not make definitive and never-changing statements. Any scientist that does should have his lab coat burned, all his pens and pencils snapped and the words ‘Not a real geek’ branded into his forehead.

Yet as far as the antismokers are concerned, smoking causes lung cancer and that’s all there is to it. The same is true of the global warmers and all the rest of the ‘science is settled’ crowd. All of them are responsible for the death of science and the destruction of the image of a scientist as a neutral observer, a researcher who wants to know the truth, whatever the outcome. They have turned science on its head: data must agree with the prewritten conclusions or the data is wrong. Reality must conform to the rabid imaginings of the insane.

The science-is-settled brigade are responsible for the deaths of the elderly who cannot afford to heat their homes, for the deaths of those nonsmokers who ‘couldn’t possibly have lung cancer’, and for sending science and medicine into a state that a mediaeval alchemist would deride as primitive superstition.

Even a caveman would scratch his head at some of the lunatic pronouncements. “Smoke kill? But smoke and fire keep away lions and cook food.” The antis would say he’s scratching his head because the smoke has given him dandruff. They really are that stupid. They believe that smoking cannabis is harmless but smoking tobacco is deadly. As far as the lungs are concerned, there is no difference at all. For the brain, well, there is some difference but the chemical difference doesn’t affect what the lungs experience. So if smoking cannabis doesn’t cause lung cancer, then neither does smoking tobacco, cabbage or asparagus.

Even some of the Big Antitobacco have started to realise the nonsense of their position. Junican has a new paper by a smoker-hater that has at least attempted to apply real science but still, it’s all about smoking. His million subjects are a hell of a good sample set but as Junican points out, they are self-selected. Take a random one million out of seventy million and you have a good statistical base. Take one million who have something in common – all of them health-conscious – and your subset is no longer a random sample. You have the one-seventieth of the population who are health-conscious, the other sixty-nine seventieths are a different set entirely. Recognise that and you can still do some good research. Ignore it and your research is nonsense.

Science and medicine is, to use the vernacular, fucked. It needs rebuilding from scratch. I’m not interested in going back to it, other than as an independent, because it is suffused with money and politics to the extent that the real science won’t get a look in.

I know my tone is flippant, it is in real life too, but there is a serious message here. Don’t expect to see a real cure for cancer until the fingers that point are all snapped off, and we get back to actual research again.

I don’t think it will happen in my lifetime.