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E-Cigarettes Are Effective At Helping Smokers Quit, a Study Says (nytimes.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: The study, published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that e-cigarettes were nearly twice as effective as conventional nicotine replacement products, like patches and gum, for quitting smoking. The success rate was still low -- 18 percent among the e-cigarette group, compared to 9.9 percent among those using traditional nicotine replacement therapy -- but many researchers who study tobacco and nicotine said it gave them the clear evidence they had been looking for. The study was conducted in Britain and funded by the National Institute for Health Research and Cancer Research UK. For a year, it followed 886 smokers assigned randomly to use either e-cigarettes or traditional nicotine replacement therapies. Both groups also participated in at least four weekly counseling sessions, an element regarded as critical for success. The findings could give some new legitimacy to e-cigarette companies like Juul, which have been under fire from the government and the public for contributing to what the Food and Drug Administration has called an epidemic of vaping among teenagers. But they could also exacerbate the difficulty of keeping the devices away from young people who have never smoked while making them available for clinical use.
If all smokers switched to vape tomorrow, would there be a massive overall improvement in health? Of course there would be.
That was already disproven (including one of the researchers involved in the study actually condemning it) as the way they got those results was by taking a discontinued $3 4w ecig top (the kind you used to find in gas stations around 2012 which nobody has used in ages) and slapping it on a mech mod (something that on average costs over $100 and is used by the kind of hardcore vapers that would never use a $3 top) so they could pump over 80w into a 4w tank.
Did they detect formaldehyde? Sure when you pump 80w into a 4w device you are gonna detect all kinds of things as it literally melts, in fact several YouTubers tried to recreate the "experiment" but couldn't even get the device to hit as it was burning up too quick. BTW do you know who funded the study? Your good friends at RJ Reynolds.
But feel free to look up "ecig formaldehyde" on YouTube as you will find many trying to recreate the results and you can watch exactly what happens when you pump 80w+ into a 4w piece of plastic with a wire as small as a human hair, what comes out certainly isn't vapor. Luckily its pretty much physically impossible to do unless you use exotic hardware like a mech mod because all devices that have been made in the last 5 years or so have automatic detection of wattage so they simply will not let you run too much power into a low power tank, it just won't fire and will give you an error code.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I strongly believe the crutches will greatly increase the probability that a person won't quit smoking.
Yes, lots of people strongly believe stupid shit despite all available evidence to the contrary that makes them feel better about themselves. See SUVs and anti-vaxxers.
"Old man yells at systemd"
E-Cigarettes are obsolete. F-Cigarettes and G-Cigarettes are already shipping. Get with the times or be outsourced to cheap hungry countries.
Table-ized A.I.
In other news, this story was posted today:
https://www.webmd.com/smoking-...
I haven't read further to see if they controlled for latent effects of prior smoking (which would presumably explain most of the increased risk for the subset of vapers who had switched from smoking to vaping), but researchers recently found that people who vape (but don't smoke) had a 71% higher risk of stroke, 59% higher risk of heart attack or angina, and 40 percent higher risk of heart disease.
The sample size is impressive: "The researchers included nearly 66,800 people who said they had ever regularly used e-cigarettes, comparing them with about 344,000 people who'd never tried the devices."
And they controlled for some major factors: "The increased health risks linked to e-cigarette use held strong even after Ndunda and his colleagues accounted for other potential risk factors, such as age, excess weight, diabetes and smoking."
But this study would be far more compelling if it compared people who vape but have not smoked to people who do neither. I hope you found it interesting anyway.
As my wife was instructed by a doc after several tries with patches: Following the instructions tapers you too fast - like by a factor of two to three. You get withdrawal and give up.
So she followed the doctor's instructions and went through more than one box of step one - until she wasn't feeling withdrawal symptoms - then went to step 2, etc. (There may have been a scheduling tweak in there, with partial overlap and staggered timing of two lower dose tabs to achieve an additional intermediate step.)
She's been smoke free now for several years.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
...is 35% owned by Altria, AKA Philip Morris, acquired for $13 billion late last year. Expect a lot more reporting of how wonderful vaping is from now on. Meanwhile, we have a vaping epidemic hitting schools. Are we going to do this all over again?
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
After losing both my father and mother to COPD from smoking in less than a year my youngest gifted me with an ecig kit, saying "We've had enough funerals in this family, I don't want to have to bury you too", that was 6 years ago and to this day I've been cigarette free which for a pack and a half a day smoker? Is saying something.
I still vape but I went from 20mg all the way down to 3mg and I feel a hell of a lot better. I don't get winded like I used to, I don't wake up every morning hacking my brains out, the closest thing I have to a "downside" these days is the wife using me as an air freshener, telling me something like "My SUV is kinda stuffy so you are driving...and bring the one that smells like blueberries" LOL. Hell of a lot nicer than that nasty dingy smell of old cigarette smoke.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
No one actually quits, they just switch from smoking to vaping. And sometimes back and forth as money permits (or doesn't).
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it! --Longbottle
A lot of these comments put in perspective the general mentality towards harm reduction in America. Many people are benefiting from using e-cigs to reduce the harm caused by nicotine products. People using them to manage a problem they have are being called gross and douchey. The 'Just Say No' mentality that worked so well for the D.A.R.E. generation is being applied here. Many Americans share the same sentiments when they speak on the opioid epidemic in America. Even knowing that opioids were being over-prescribed for most of the late 90's and early 2000's, there's still a huge number of Americans blaming the users, telling users to go cold turkey even knowing that could potentially prove fatal to opioid addicts, fighting methadone clinics and safe injection sites because property values, providing no reasonable alternative to handling an epidemic that is killing a record number of Americans. Harm reduction needs some real support in Congress if America is ever going to start conquering its real problems, and hopefully not in the same way that alcohol prohibition changed the cultural values that Americans held about alcohol. Just imagine, people used to drink whiskey with their breakfast in the 1800's.
Actually, no. Vaping is not smoking. Would you rather the teens vape or smoke? I ask because history has long proven that your preferred option of neither one just doesn't happen in the real world.
Do you get an irritated red spot when you thump your chest that much?
I'll play along.
... well it shouldn't be there. I was a 30 a day smoker until early December 2018. I'm sucking so hard on a nicotine free e-cig these days begging for something to come out of it that I could probably make an excellent career as a male prostitute now.
I still have a pack of Marlboro on the dinner table that I tap into... more often than I should. And I have a pack in the car which
You're probably right that the massive decrease in smoking has been financially damaging to many people around the world. But companies and shareholders are two different things and there are too many people who don't get that.
You seem to think that there's some sort of major money making machine out there that if a company doesn't perform well, the owners are going to lose their asses and such. This could be medical research for cancer. It can be a tobacco company... pretty much any company capable of profiting from tobacco taxes.
This is not how it works.
The owners of the companies are the shareholders. The shareholders can generally move their investments from one company to another. If they want to get some extra cash from the company, they can force it to deplete its cash by paying dividends. They can even get the company to take a loan and use that money to pay dividends leaving the company bankrupt, in debt and ready to collapse, but it takes an amazing accountant to make that work cleanly.
Every company making money from big Tobacco is covered. The shareholders of those companies have already left the companies. They've moved onto whatever Forbes or Gartner is interested in these days. Instead, what's left is investors who specialize in profiting as companies shrink. There is such a thing. It's possible for the owners of a company to find ways to profit from writing off losses for example.
Let's say you're Emma Watson and you've had a great year and tax time is coming. One option for Hollywood actors in the past has been to buy into producing a film guaranteed to fail at the box office. This would let you take a loss in a possibly fun way. The alternative is to invest in a company that will lose money on a steady schedule so the loses can be written off. Creative accountants can find ways to make a million in losses come back as 10 million in non-taxable income or better.
So those companies are amazing targets for people in need of write-offs right now and there's a ton of money to be made that way.