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Originally Posted by raveneye
Well if you're excluding all papers that cite studies that are flawed in some way, then I doubt that either one of us will be left with enough studies to count on one hand.
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You and I could find "flaws" in every study, all day long.
I take exception with this particular study because it has been proven flawed, in a court of law, not because I simply didn't agree with the findings. That is why I stated that I wouldn't be able to accept any study that uses the EPA study as a primary reference.
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Originally Posted by raveneye
Plus you are using the term "methodology" in a manner that I do not use it and no scientist would use it, since that term by definition does not include any filtering of the identity of references cited, unless the references themselves are a subject of the research.
So let me propose an alternative (since I no longer know what you mean when you use the word "methodology").
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I'm not following you here.
I see it as this way:
I feel that the studies in the 50's and 60's were done to find out why people were dying of lung cancer, emphysema, etc. They studied it and studied it and found that a connection occurred with smoking. They didn't go into it (at least that's my impression) with the idea of proving smoking was the culprit, rather they went looking for the culprit and found it.
The SHS studies seem to go about it backwards. They were looking to prove that SHS killed a lot of people. And, when evidence didn't agree with them, they excluded the evidence to reach their goal. Then, others hoped on the bandwagon and added on to the already flawed research.
Like I said, I am not disputing that SHS is a dangerous substance. I am disputing the 3,000/45-60,000 deaths each year that they are trying to tie to passive smoke. My feeling is that passive smoke is no more dangerous than the smog most of us breathe on a daily basis, maybe less.
There is no way to quantify exactly what a person breathes in/doesn't breathe in on a daily basis, and the studies admit this....they admit they are guessing.
The #2 cause of lung cancer is Radon exposure, yet I haven't seen anything that takes radon exposure into account for the lung cancer of non-smokers. Since they can't go back in the past and find Radon, there is no way to remove it from the equation--but they do, nonetheless.
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Originally Posted by raveneye
Why don't you just specify, in as much detail as you can, exactly what the minimum scientific requirements would be for you to conclude that some risk factor caused harm. For example, we could specify harm as "death" or "contract cancer" or something else.
After you tell us what your minimum requirement is, then I will show you either (1) neither active nor passive smoking studies meet your requirement; or (2) both active and passive smoking studies meet your requirement.
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I agree that is causes some harm, I haven't argued that at all.
The current claim is that somewhere in the neighborhood of 45-60,000 people die, each year, from heart disease related to exposure to SHS. That seems really, really high to me and difficult to swallow.
I want to know: how is genetics ruled out? How are other environmental/diet/physical aspects ruled out?
How did they come to the conclusion that nothing but SHS caused these hundreds of thousands of people to die?
I want to know why a non-smoker who lives with a smoker dies less than someone who happens to be around SHS? The non-smoker living with a smoker is around SHS every day of the week, every day of the year, yet they are harmed less by it? Saying a few of the smokers are nice and smoke outside doesn't work for me because it is a guess, we don't know, we don't know how much SHS is around this particular non-smoker.
There just seems, to me, to be too many variables to this:
1) When they did their testing they used a machine to simulate smoking - a machine doesn't cover the filter like a human smoker does, thus ETS around a machine (which includes smoke from the "smoker" and smoke directly from the cigarette) will be less toxic than ETS around a human smoker (who has less sidestream smoke than a machine smoker).
2) Each year we discover new things that can kill us. All of these substances, toxins, pollutants, emissions, etc. are around us on a daily basis, how do you remove them as variables in this equation? According to the studies I read, they remove these variables by saying "we know what toxins are in cigarette smoke" and we "know that Person A was around cigarette smoke at some time" so, thus, their disease is related to SHS because they were around it. It almost seems like the study was complete from end to beginning.
3) We are still learning about genetics involving cancer and heart disease (i.e. why does the smoker live to be 90 years old and the health-nut drops dead at age 40 while jogging. I haven't seen anything that takes this into account--I'm not saying it isn't there, I'm saying I haven't seen it. Also, which is more of a contributing factor? If someone has a family history of heart disease and they have a lot of exposure to SHS, which was the contributing factor? How was the other factor removed?
Do you see where I am going with this?