Posted on 09/16/2012 6:48:40 PM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
FRIDAY, Sept. 14 (HealthDay News) — Regular exposure to secondhand smoke has a negative effect on brain function, according to a new British study that found people who live with or spend a significant amount of time with a smoker are damaging their memories.
“According to recent reports by the World Health Organization, exposure to secondhand smoke can have serious consequences on the health of people who have never smoked themselves, but who are exposed to other people’s tobacco smoke,” Dr. Tom Heffernan, a researcher at the Collaboration for Drug and Alcohol Research Group at Northumbria University, said in a university news release. “Our findings suggest that the deficits associated with secondhand smoke exposure extend to everyday cognitive function.”
The researchers compared a group of smokers with two groups of nonsmokers. Participants in one nonsmoking group were exposed to secondhand smoke either at home or in a “smoking area” for an average of 25 hours a week for an average 4.5 years. Those in the other nonsmoking group were not routinely exposed to secondhand smoke.
Study participants from all three groups took a time-based memory test, which required them to perform a task after a set period of time. The also had to recall planned activities in an event-based memory test, which focuses on memory for future intentions.
Nonsmokers who were exposed to secondhand smoke forgot almost 20 percent more in the memory tests than the other nonsmoking group did, the study revealed.
Smokers performed the worst of all on the memory tests. They forgot 30 percent more than those who were not exposed to secondhand smoke.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.health.com ...
These anti-tobacco people are nuts!
BTW, practically every writer of the 20th century smoked, and they did so precisely because it made the synapses fire faster. Stephen King and Joe Eszterhaus have even said this specifically. They don't smoke anymore, but they admit that they don't write as quickly without smoking.
I was going to post something but forgot what it was.
Yep, at the time global warning first gained traction, the EPA distinguished itself by opening up a new era in politicized science: the laboratory push poll.
They're also broken new ground in the "materialist magician" front (with a hat tip to C.S. Lewis.) Remember the stories of the medicine man who claimed that his taboo would cause heart attacks if it were looked into closely? [As it turns out, it is possible to induce heart attacks by scaring people deeply with a taboo.] More modern ostensibly-religious charlatans have done the old medicine man one better by making the dark drum-enhanced warnings unfalsifiable. Instead of the dark forces striking down the miscreants who buck the taboo with heart attacks, those who are brave enough to enquire more closely fall into the dark side! They're now evil! Evilly evil!
Of course, this line has already been seen through thanks to the rout of the old-style Puritans. And, of course, atheists are deeply uncomfortable with the conclusion that a political Puritan with a well-read copy of Dawkins and a science degree is still a political Puritan. Or, it might be as simple as that type in the self-advertised "helping professions" being uncomfortable with being the neighbourhood finger pointer.
What comes to the rescue? Marxism, whether genuine (if watered) or ersatz. No, it isn't the skeptics that are evil-evil. It's the purveyors of associated products that are evilly evil! I'm sure you know how the rest goes: just add hostility to monetary transactions (except for their own, of course) and away it goes. Oddly, this narrative of typically well-paid politicized scientists depends upon them striking a pose as ascetic monks who live on bread and water. Their own funding - typically from government, which gives them an obvious incentive to blithely assume that "more government = more better" - is hardly questioned. Playing the pious monk has worked well for them, a strange irony given that they are typically Darwinists and statistics-as-metaphysics atheists.
Nevertheless, the fix in in for them. Anyone who seriously questions the design of this experiment is going to be credibly labelled as being "in the pay of the tobacco companies." The truth of that claim is irrelevent to them, as is noting that it relies on the genetic fallacy, because it's a point of dogma. Any real scientist who's pesky enough to look for any push-poll element in the experiment's design is going to have to ignore that dogma, to treat its expression as mere cavilling.
I can very easily "prove" that second-hand smoke is as harmful as chain-smoking. All I have to do is dump enough tobacco smoke - direct from the cigarettes - into the smoke room to make the density equal to the density of the smoke inhaled by a regular smoker. I could also "prove" that a powerful stereo system is "unsafe" to the ears by jacking up the volume to a level hardly anyone uses and stick the measuring microphone an inch away from the speaker. In a nutshell, that's how you push poll in politicized science. In concept, it's as easy as rigging up a fake 'miracle' for the local peasantry.
As for second-hand smoke specifically, diddling the findings is pretty easy. Most second-hand smoke gets distributed through the lungs of first-hand smokers, not from the cigarettes themselves. Guess what happens to the smoke while it passes through the lungs of the first-hand smoker? It gets diluted, doesn't it? To assume that second-hand smoke from smokers' lungs is equal to second-hand smoke directly from the cigarette is to assume that the smoke goes in the lungs and out of the lungs as if it went in and out of a beaker. In other words, it is to assume that smoking has no effect on the first-hand smoker except for temporary contact of the smoke with the smoker's lungs. If that opinion were true, there wouldn't be any nicotine rush from smoking a cigarette because the nicotine wouldn't have gotten into the bloodstream.
So, the easy way to push-poll a second-hand-smoke study is to use second-hand smoke directly from a burning tobacco source. Another way, now thankfully discredited, is to use the inch-from-the-speaker trick. And, of course, there's more general density-diddling.
As for this particular study, I actually had no problem with its conclusions re. first-hand smoke. And, to their credit, the authors were careful enough to look over first-hand smokers as well. They thus avoided the obvious way for a layman to catch out a push-poll politicized scientist in this area: looking for 'findings' about second-hand smoke that contradict what's known about first-hand smoke.
I stuck to second-hand smoke because it's the subject of this thread. I haven't gone into more arcane tricks like widening (the statistical) confidence intervals because I don't know how they work. I'll have to leave exposure of those tricks to people more knowledgable than I. But, as I indicated above, those push-poll tricks are in no way confined to second-hand-smoke. Remember that point about adulterated/ersatz Marxism? That's the beacon light guiding you to where standards may be compromised. "Hide the decline" lives.
Anyone remember images of NASA Mission control in the 60s and 70s?
Now there was a room full of dummies wasn’t there? lol
Hmmm, I forgot if I read this.
His reasoning makes perfect sense to me, lol. Chocolate cake is a great breakfast, add a few potato chips with it, yum, yum.
“Daddy MADE us eat this!” :)
My teenagers are like that.
So funny. I think that was the funniest skit ever. Eat Cake!!!!
Funny, I don’t even remember ever being around second-hand smoke.
One or the other: They are very STUPID or they are geniuses, aka managers or government workers in the making. Nah! just cleverly lazy.
I sometimes wonder how my husband manages to function in his job. Given that he’s quite a successful network engineer, I’ve concluded that (as I said in my first post) it’s a question of will rather than ability. Because it’s necessary for him to be competent in his work environment, he is. Because he can get away with being incompetent at home, he is.
That is just so funny, and so describes many, many, many males.
BUT, guess what? Women raised those boys. Then those same mothers defend their little precious innocent boys against the wives. RIGHT?
My boy works SO HARD, hahahahahahahahahahahahaha
One time at work, while watching those men get by with doing nothing, barely lifting a finger, I asked one young man this, knowing that his wife also worked and had kids to take care of. "Do you actually have the nerve to go home and tell your overworked wife what a hard day at work you had?"
He had the nerve to say "YES".
Interestingly, Der Prinz and I both grew up in homes with smokers.
BAD DOPE!!!!!
My EXWIFE had a mother for a smoker, I smoked from the day I met her till 1990 (27 years) and we stayed married for 43 years, my daughters were raised around me, I didn’t quit till my grandaughter was born....
AND I WILL GUARANTEE they have not forgotten a thing about me - at least not the ‘bad things’.
And my EXWIFE wasn’t the smartest tree in the forest, she married me didn’t she????
We never FORGET nuttin honey, hahahaha just kidding.
Your comment is priceless.
Everybody knows that and that will be the next headline. /sarc
Thank you. I needed that belly-laugh.
But, of course, they don't tell you that.
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