Do you suffer from Pseudo-Skepticism?

[merrily]

73. This article alludes to some of what I posted and also to some of what you posted.

http://www.ucdmc.ucdavis.edu/welcome/features/20071114_cardio-tobacco/

Including what I posted about studies commissioned by the tobacco companies and their internally done studies. (They kept secret the results they did not like.)

And now they are doing studies to back up false claims about more modern forms of smoking.


It was not only lay people who were fooled, but also doctors. This article says that, as of 1960, many doctors not only believed smoking was okay but actually smoked themselves, furthering the impression that cigarettes must be safe. (Near the end of the 1800s was when people began to suspect a connection between smoking and lung cancer, so 1960 was quite far into the "linking" process.)

One source of information for the history of ignorance is the polling data amassed by professional opinion research agencies and their tobacco industry counterparts. In 1954, for example, George Gallup sampled a broad swath of the US public to ask: ‘do you think cigarette smoking is one of the causes of lung cancer, or not?’ 41% answered ‘yes’, with the remainder answering either ‘no’ or ‘undecided’.30 Even large numbers of doctors remained unconvinced. In 1960, in a poll organised by the American Cancer Society, only a third of all US doctors agreed that cigarette smoking should be considered ‘a major cause of lung cancer’. This same poll revealed that 43% of all American doctors were still smoking cigarettes on a regular basis, with occasional users accounting for another 5%.31 With half of all doctors smoking, it should come as no surprise that most Americans remained unconvinced of life-threatening harms from the habit.

http://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/21/2/87.full

So, again, it not a matter of science selling out. However, if I see a newspaper report about a study that supposedly concluded that lots of salt is great for my health and I see that a company in the business of selling salt commissioned the study, I might squint, based on what I know the tobacco companies did.