Honestly the research on exactly why this happens is sparse enough as it is. It’s basically impossible to do truly conclusive studies with tobacco because of how dangerous it is. We can’t even technically conclusively say that tobacco causes cancer because to truly scientifically assert that you’d have to do a randomized controlled trial.
To have a truly randomized controlled trial you would have to randomly select people from the overall sample and tell them to start smoking for the purposes of the study (otherwise you can’t technically rule out there being some third thing that both causes the cancer and causes people to want to smoke). And because we know tobacco is insanely addictive and are all but that one millimeter short of proving that it causes cancer, no medical ethics oversight body would ever allow a study that requires participants to start smoking.
Oh absolutely, I’m glad we’re not doing that. I don’t get why there’s so few statistical studies, like ‘people who have been using (e.g.) chewing tobacco have x health stat compared to y in the general population’. It’s frustrating, especially with how many young people are using snus and vapes in recent years. It’s tough to make informed health decisions when the information is hard to come by.
Just curious, is this true for smokeless tobacco too? I mean not the tar bit obviously, just the paralysing.
Honestly the research on exactly why this happens is sparse enough as it is. It’s basically impossible to do truly conclusive studies with tobacco because of how dangerous it is. We can’t even technically conclusively say that tobacco causes cancer because to truly scientifically assert that you’d have to do a randomized controlled trial.
To have a truly randomized controlled trial you would have to randomly select people from the overall sample and tell them to start smoking for the purposes of the study (otherwise you can’t technically rule out there being some third thing that both causes the cancer and causes people to want to smoke). And because we know tobacco is insanely addictive and are all but that one millimeter short of proving that it causes cancer, no medical ethics oversight body would ever allow a study that requires participants to start smoking.
Oh absolutely, I’m glad we’re not doing that. I don’t get why there’s so few statistical studies, like ‘people who have been using (e.g.) chewing tobacco have x health stat compared to y in the general population’. It’s frustrating, especially with how many young people are using snus and vapes in recent years. It’s tough to make informed health decisions when the information is hard to come by.