There's something in the air tonight!

Yes, it's Guy Fawkes night and as I write the noise is deafening from the fireworks that seem to get louder and louder with each passing year. It is unsettling the wife, who has Alzheimer's so a long night lies ahead. I, late evening, took a four minute walk to the local shop to get my rolling tobacco and as I walked their the air was thick with cordite and smoke, not tobacco smoke, you understand, that's too deadly to see the light of the inside of a pub, but the smoke made by other lit combustibles that our citizens partake of this time of year, a jolly time of year when the average UK citizen lets their hair down and...party!

But this jovial celebration of a Catholic being hung, drawn and quartered a few hundred years ago is deemed non pc in a couple of quarters (forgive the pun) these days and should be banned, not on a health issue, there never is a health issue, but because it may offend a Catholic or three who never were offended in the first place. Any sane person would firmly place these events in the time that it happened rather than bring them up in the present, but I am talking about sanity here.

Enjoy Guy Fawkes night.

Only in America? The SHS nuisance $$$

When I first heard that the UK was proposing a smoking ban based on the absurdity that SHS (Second Hand Smoke) was detrimental to a non smoker's health I was appalled. Oh I knew it could be an irritation to some but in no way was it lethal nor was is it detrimental to their health and wellbeing. But those that loath smoking and tobacco convinced politicians that it was thus, using spurious at best, lies at most to hoodwink them and the great British public into thinking it was so.

Now that the anti smoker and their cohorts at ASH et al have their way with smoking bans aplenty they turn their attention to widening their remit into the very fabric of your personal space, your car will, if the banners get their way, be an exclusion zone for smokers who have children under a certain age and, with the invention of third hand smoke, you will be banned from taking your kids in a car where a smoking parent once smoked, this is coming, whether you rail against it or not, they are that powerful.

It all started in the "land of the free"!

I live in a block of flats and I am waiting for a ban from my landlords that say I cannot smoke in my personal abode as the smoke travels and infilcts many harms on other residents and I can see this coming to pass as I read this from the USA.

The Greenbelt secondhand smoke trial came to a quick conclusion today after a lengthy trial. Judge Albert Northrop ruled David Schuman deserved no compensation for his claim that his neighbor’s secondhand smoke created a nuisance that Greenbelt Homes Inc. (GHI) failed to solve.

 Yes, that's right, this anti smoking a*hole took his landlords to court claiming compo because he claims SHS caused a nuisance to him (notice there is no mention of health throughout) but Judge Northrop did not see it that way.

Northrop noted if he had ruled in favor of Schuman the case would set the precedent for action on secondhand smoke claims not just for condominiums and townhomes, but also single-family homes.

Instead, Northrop said that the level of secondhand smoke entering David Schuman’s townhouse was not an actionable nuisance. Nor did he see bad faith in GHI's handling of Schuman’s complaints.

After the decision was read, David Schuman and his attorney, J. P. Szymkowicz walked out of the courtroom and retreated to a conference room.
“We’re very pleased with the outcome,” said Gretchen Overdurff, GHI general manager, after the decision was read, “It was appropriate and our counsel did a good job.”

 Read the lot here but how long will it take for this type of action take to come to our shores?

What starts in America never, ever stays their. You have been warned!

Words of wisdom from...

...an NHS site?

If you’ve just read a health-related headline that has caused you to spit out your morning coffee (“Coffee causes cancer” usually does the trick), it’s always best to follow the Blitz slogan: “Keep Calm and Carry On”. On reading further, you’ll often find the headline has left out something important, such as, “Injecting five rats with really highly concentrated coffee solution caused some changes in cells that might lead to tumours eventually. (Study funded by The Association of Tea Marketing)”.

The most important rule to remember is: don’t automatically believe the headline. It is there to draw you into buying the paper and reading the story. Would you read an article called, “Coffee pretty unlikely to cause cancer, but you never know”? Probably not.

To avoid spraying your newspaper with coffee in the future, you need to analyse the article to see what it says about the research it is reporting on. Bazian (the company I work for) has appraised hundreds of articles for Behind The Headlines on NHS Choices, and we’ve developed the following questions to help you figure out which articles you’re going to believe and which you’re not.

Unfortunately the sheeple of the UK who read the likes of the Daily Fail believe every word of those deceitful headlines, hook, line and sinker.

And don't ask them to ask themselves...

Does the article support its claims with scientific research?

Your first concern should be the research behind the news article. If an article touts a treatment or some aspect of your lifestyle that is supposed to prevent or cause a disease, but doesn’t give any information about the scientific research behind it, then treat it with a lot of caution. The same applies to research that has yet to be published.

Obviously the writer of this column in NHS Choices, Dr Alicia White, does not mix socially with Daily Fail readers and when it comes to their lifestyle choices then they'd rather let someone else decide for them.


I have put the rest of the article below and when you have finished reading it ask yourselves this, am I a Daily Fail reader in spirit?

Is the article based on a conference abstract?

Another area for caution is if the news article is based on a conference abstract. Research presented at conferences is often at a preliminary stage and usually hasn’t been scrutinised by experts in the field. Also, conference abstracts rarely provide full details about methods, making it difficult to judge how well the research was conducted. For these reasons, articles based on conference abstracts should be no cause for alarm. Don’t panic or rush off to your GP. 

Was the research in humans?

Quite often, the “miracle cure” in the headline turns out to have only been tested on cells in the laboratory or on animals. These stories are regularly accompanied by pictures of humans, which creates the illusion that the miracle cure came from human studies. Studies in cells and animals are crucial first steps and should not be undervalued. However, many drugs that show promising results in cells in laboratories don’t work in animals, and many drugs that show promising results in animals don’t work in humans. If you read a headline about a drug or food “curing” rats, there is a chance it might cure humans in the future, but unfortunately a larger chance that it won’t. So there is no need to start eating large amounts of the “wonder food” featured in the article.

How many people did the research study include?

In general, the larger a study the more you can trust its results. Small studies may miss important differences because they lack statistical “power”, and are also more susceptible to finding things (including things that are wrong) purely by chance.

You can visualise this by thinking about tossing a coin. We know that if we toss a coin the chance of getting a head is the same as that of getting a tail – 50/50. However, if we didn’t know this and we tossed a coin four times and got three heads and one tail, we might conclude that getting heads was more likely than tails. But this chance finding would be wrong. If we tossed the coin 500 times - i.e. gave the experiment more "power" - we'd be more likely to get a heads/tails ratio close to 50/50, giving us a better idea of the true odds. When it comes to sample sizes, bigger is usually better. So when you see a study conducted in a handful of people, treat it with caution.

Did the study have a control group?

There are many different types of studies appropriate for answering different types of questions. If the question being asked is about whether a treatment or exposure has an effect or not, then the study needs to have a control group. A control group allows the researchers to compare what happens to people who have the treatment/exposure with what happens to people who don’t. If the study doesn’t have a control group, then it’s difficult to attribute results to the treatment or exposure with any level of certainty.

Also, it’s important that the control group is as similar to the treated/exposed group as possible. The best way to achieve this is to randomly assign some people to be in the treated/ exposed group and some people to be in the control group. This is what happens in a randomised controlled trial (RCT) and is why RCTs are considered the “gold standard” for testing the effects of treatments and exposures. So when reading about a drug, food or treatment that is supposed to have an effect, you want to look for evidence of a control group, and ideally, evidence that the study was an RCT. Without either, retain some healthy scepticism.

Did the study actually assess what’s in the headline?

This one is a bit tricky to explain without going into a lot of detail about things called proxy outcomes. Instead, bear in mind this key point: the research needs to have examined what is being talked about in the headline and article. (Somewhat alarmingly, this isn’t always the case.)

For example, you might read a headline that claims, “Tomatoes reduce the risk of heart attacks”. What you need to look for is evidence that the study actually looked at heart attacks. You might instead see that the study found that tomatoes reduce blood pressure. This means that someone has extrapolated that tomatoes must also have some impact on heart attacks, as high blood pressure is a risk factor for heart attacks. Sometimes these extrapolations will prove to be true, but other times they won’t. Therefore if a news story is focusing on a health outcome that was not examined by the research, treat it with a pinch of salt.

Who paid for and conducted the study?

This is a somewhat cynical point, but one that’s worth making. The majority of trials today are funded by manufacturers of the product being tested – be it a drug, vitamin cream or foodstuff. This means they have a vested interest in the results of the trial, which can potentially affect what the researchers find and report in all sorts of conscious and unconscious ways. This is not to say that all manufacturer-sponsored trials are unreliable. Many are very good. However, it’s worth seeing who funded the study to sniff out a potential conflict of interest.

Should you “shoot the messenger”?

Overblown claims might not necessarily be down to the news reporting itself. Although journalists can sometimes misinterpret a piece of research, at other times the researchers (or other interested parties) over-extrapolate, making claims their research doesn’t support. These claims are then repeated by the journalists.

Given that erroneous claims can come from a variety of places, don’t automatically assume they come from the journalist. Instead, use the questions above to figure out for yourself what you’re going to believe and what you’re not.

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