VAPING WAS CALLED SAFER THAN SMOKING
WHAT HAPPENED?
In an increasingly lethal pattern, the manufactured distortions of a Medical/Media/Institutional complex are allowed to generate and drive public health epidemics.
By Clark Miller
Published July 22, 2020
Updated April 14, 2021; November 26, 2021
The predictable happened:
And continues to worsen.
Below – UPDATE: NEW EVIDENCE OF TROUBLING YOUTH DIABETES TRENDS CONSISTENT WITH PREDICTED EFFECTS OF INCREASING NICOTINE USE WITH VAPING
Opioids were called safe and effective for all pain by America’s top medical and public health authorities and institutions. What happened?
The predictable happened:
In a collusion of American media and public health institutions and driven by abdication of professional and ethical responsibility by medical industries and practitioners, inappropriate runaway provision of medical treatments (opioid pain killers that are no more effective than over-the-counter medications) for the non-medical condition of common chronic pain – against all relevant, longstanding lines of evidence – predicted and generated the worsening opioid crisis.
Medications were called effective cures for compulsive substance use, assured by America’s top medical authorities to be established as a medically treatable chronic brain disease. What happened?
The predictable happened:
Medical dispensing of substitute addictive opioids was called a safe “gold standard” effective “treatment” for opioid dependence and the lethal opioid epidemic. What happened?
The predictable happened:
The same American mass media/medical collusion that fabricated evidence generating the lethal opioid epidemic now distorts research to fabricate evidence for another invalidated medical/pharmacological fix for a non-medical problem, the use of substitute opioids worsening instead of treating the public health epidemic.
As more and more of the medical cures are dispensed, the epidemics worsen and worsen – a pattern apparently insufficient to instill the insight that the cures aren’t working. While America gets sicker and sicker.
(from The Guardian – November 29, 2018)
It’s an pattern established unequivocally by all lines of relevant evidence and that – despite efforts of popularizers of the failed medical OST “treatment” – is not explained away by intentional abuse with known risks of fentanyl, established here and here.
Antidepressants were called safe and effective for depressed mood. What happened?
The predictable happened:
Administration of nicotine by vaporizing (vaping) and inhaling was called effective for cessation of tobacco smoking, endorsed as “innovative” in the nation’s top medical journal. What happened?
Right.
Late in 2017 the nation’s top medical journal – Journal of the American Medical Association, JAMA – featured endorsement of an “innovative” plan by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for use of electronic cigarettes, “vaping”, to substitute for that of tobacco cigarettes as a form of medical harm reduction. The message was clear and came from one of the America’s most trusted and authoritative medical institutions: vaping is a much safer alternative to smoking. That message targeted, through mass media dissemination, a vulnerable and trusting public trapped in arguably this culture’s most costly and lethal compulsive substance use problem, the annual half-million deaths due to tobacco use eclipsing those related to alcohol, opioids, and other street drugs combined.
The message would also have been taken as authoritative by America’s medical professionals,
who encounter smokers routinely in primary care and other settings and advise them on interventions to help stop smoking. Institutions including top medical journals, medical regulatory agencies, and media have powerful influence on American medical practice, their cultural fabrication of a new medical gold standard for treatment of chronic pain, for example, substituted for clinical and ethical judgment and responsibility and resulted in runaway, medically inappropriate dispensing of Schedule II opioids for the established non-medical condition of common chronic pain generating a lethal public opioid crisis. But that’s another story.
That JAMA-endorsed medical harm reduction flipped within months, predictably, to a child nicotine abuse and dependence problem, now widely recognized as another public health epidemic.
The public disinformation campaign worked, providing for booming sales and use of vape products. Worked, that is, apart from the worsening child nicotine dependence epidemic.
And apart from the emerging adult vaping illness epidemic.
But it’s not just advertising at work, when e-cigarette use is endorsed as an innovative harm reduction approach in the nation’s leading medical journal, and the same journal endorses a research report – disseminated to American medical practitioners – with claims that vaping is an effective method for stopping cigarette use, repeated in authoritative media outlets.
As reported in JAMA and published in another leading medical research journal, the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) the landmark study, a “seminal study” according to medical authorities, establishes that vaping of nicotine is effective for stopping use of tobacco by smoking, affirming vaping as a new medical gold standard for smoking cessation. It’s even more effective than nicotine replacement treatment (NRT), based on critical evaluation of the research study by medical professionals, leading authorities, and major mass media. (Coincidentally, NEJM is the top medical research journal that published another seminal study not long ago – the study establishing that Schedule II opioids were safe and effective to use for all pain, including chronic pain.)
What happened?
It’s just that – the study in question establishing vaping as a new medical gold standard actually provides no evidence at all of benefit for smoking cessation from either NRT or e-cigarette use, instead points to no benefit.
It’s also that the demonstrably false, unvalidated claims of benefit (of about 10 percent and 20 percent cessation success rates for NRT and vaping, respectively), were based on errors in experimental design and interpretation of the most elementary and demonstrable types.
That’s what happened, predictably.
As in the runaway provision of addictive opioids for the non-medical condition of common chronic pain, indicated against by all lines of relevant evidence from the start; as in a worsening depression epidemic; worsening alcohol and methamphetamine pubic health threats; provision of false, harm-predicting information to a vulnerable public on effective treatments for smoking cessation; as for the invalidated, lethal medical substitute opioid “fix” for the medically-generated opioid crisis, the predictable happened.
UPDATE: NEW EVIDENCE OF TROUBLING YOUTH DIABETES TRENDS CONSISTENT WITH PREDICTED EFFECTS OF INCREASING NICOTINE USE WITH VAPING
Remarkably, the esteemed Academies and Medical Industry reviews and recommendations along with media analyses of results, policy, and implications for public health have not yet addressed the concurrent public health epidemics directly impacted by proposed use of an FDA vaping promotion campaign –childhood and adult diabetes epidemic fueled partly by nicotine use.
The missing, potentially lethal, epidemic links – missing from the scientific reviews, medical industry recommendations, and media accounts- include:
direct effects of nicotine on risk of onset of type 2 diabetes and worsening of diabetes
That’s not good.
Now, Pediatricians are raising alarms about new evidence for increasing prevalence of type 1 and type 2 diabetes over the past two decades, based on a 2021 report in JAMA.
The findings appear more consistent with effects related to the known direct relationships among nicotine and risk of development of diabetes and surging nicotine use in youth tied to the vaping epidemic than to effects of persistent increases in youth obesity alone, another significant risk factor.
From the JAMA report –
For type 1 diabetes, increases appear larger for ages 10 to 19 compared to younger children, the older age range affected differentially by increased nicotine use and not differentially by other identified factors for risk of diabetes.
For type 2 diabetes, increases in prevalence appear greater for ages 15 to 19 compared to 10 to 14 and for that 15 – 19 group greater for the time period 2009 to 2017 that includes years after youth vaping of nicotine surged, compared to 2001 to 2009, prior to significant onset of youth vaping.
Childhood obesity and overweight have been increasing generally for all age groups over past years and decades, so don’t seem able to account for the observed differential pattern in increasing prevalence in diabetes that are associated with time frame and ages most likely to represent effects of increased nicotine use due to vaping. Across youth ages 13 to 18, prevalence of vaping increases significantly and consistently from younger to older, consistent with the apparent differences in increases in diabetes rates.
The findings for youth diabetes trends unfortunately do not include data after 2017, and these findings are open to multiple interpretations. Additional evidence will be required to evaluate population effects on youth diabetes incidence related to known risk related to nicotine use and epidemic increases in youth delivery of nicotine by inhalation
What happened? The predictable happened –
Medical “experts” and authorities entirely out of scope of competence to understand, formulate and provide treatments for the non-medical problems of common chronic pain, depressed mood, and compulsive substance use were funded and entrusted to protect public health with fabricated “treatments” that – exactly as in the media-medical collaboration to fabricate “evidence” to fuel the lethal opioid crisis – were never credibly supported by evidence for effectiveness let alone avoidance of harm.
That’s what happened, predictably –
self-protective and self-rewarding behaviors of the same pathologically compromised, incompetent and negligent collusion of American Medicine and Media that generated the opioid crisis, fuels a depression epidemic, lies to Americans about smoking cessation treatment, and is protecting a Big Pharma/Big Medicine opioid substitution (MAT, OAT, OST) “treatment” scam that is worsening the lethal epidemic they created.
Gross incompetence and medical malpractice happen.
Media cowardice, incompetence, and abdication of public responsibility happen.
Fabrication of useful evidence happens.
Preventable lethal epidemics happen.
Public healthcare funds diverted to fund harmful sham treatments happens.
Continued predictable and preventable deaths of vulnerable Americans happens.
If allowed to.
