A doctor writes
Thursday, February 5, 2015 at 18:39 It was reported yesterday that hospitals in Wales are considering on-the-spot fines for people caught smoking on hospital grounds.
BBC Wales quoted me as follows:
Simon Clark, director of pro-smoking group Forest, said the threat of fines "was absolutely abominable".
He added: "It seems extraordinary to us that NHS administrators would be spending time, and probably money, coercing people like this.
"Hospitals are very stressful places, not just for patients but also for visitors and staff.
"We can understand them not wanting people to smoke around hospital entrances, in which case the compromise should be a comfortable smoking shelter."
I was also quoted by Wales Online and the South Wales Evening Post.
Well, my comments prompted an email from a consultant anaesthetist:
I am writing with regard to the proposed enforcement of smoking bans in Welsh hospitals.
I have no objection to smokers subjecting their bodies to health risks. As a doctor of 24 years experience I used to approach young smokers with a blunt statement of the facts in order to persuade them to quit. Usually they were completely nonchalant about my efforts.
I still advise patients to quit when appropriate. But what I object to is the smokers in hospital grounds who seem to think that they are entitled to continue negatively affecting other peoples' health.
If they want to smoke, by all means carry on but away from those of us who do not wish to inhale the noxious fumes. It continues to amaze me what an inherently selfish self-centred bunch of people are those who smoke near staff and patients who cannot move out of range.
Personally it is no skin off my nose if smokers, drink drivers, base-jumpers wish to kill themselves, but just stay away from those of us who don't!!
I'll leave you to comment but before you do I suggest you read an interview with another anaesthetist.
I published it on this blog in 2010 but it was originally conducted in 2006. See: Dr Phil Button: the "lost" interview.
I'd also like to draw your attention to a passage in an essay by the late Lord Harris, former chairman of Forest. It's anecdotal but I have no reason to think it's not true:
Privately I have encountered Very Important Persons in the medical world who, in response to my earnest enquiry about 'passive smoking', have dropped their voices and looked around furtively before assuring me there was "nothing in it" except for a possibly adverse effect on serious asthmatics.
The full essay ('A Challenge to the Chief Medical Officer') appears as the foreword to a 2005 Forest report, Prejudice and Propaganda: The Truth About Passive Smoking, which you can download here. A decade on it's still worth reading.
Reader Comments (9)
The fact that he allegedly is a consultant with 24 years of experience means nothing. There have been cases of UK doctors who went abroad to join ISIS - that shows you that doctors can be just as brainwashed as the guy next door.
He mentions noxious fumes when talking about smoking outside as if he was talking about some bus from the 60s left with the motor running. And while we're on the subject, how about making hospitals a cark park free zone ?
What can one say? Who is the public going to believe - a consultant anaesthetist or err, a smoker?
Half an hour before surgery was scheduled for me I had a'discussion' with the anaesthetist who was reluctant to allow the operation on the grounds that 'outcomes' for smokers are more problematic than for non-smokers - she was worried that I "might" take longer to recover, I "might" get a chest infection. As far as I was concerned that was my lookout and that the risks of possible outcomes took a back seat to the immediate actuality of the pain that I was suffering. Eventually the doctor admitted that the medical profession was so concerned about smoking because there was no way they could predict who would contract the nasties of COPD or lung cancer. Again, it comes back to whose responsibility it is to accept/reject the risk - the State thinks it's their's, I think it's mine.
(BTW I was back at work in the time that a non-smoker would have been and I didn't get a chest infection - I'm like that - luck just flows to me like a mountain stream.....)
Healthist bigots such as your doctor correspondent remind me of the racist bigots I remember from my youth who were often prefaced their unpleasant attacks with "I'm not racist but..."
Anyone who opposes the idea of smoking shelters that provide for people's needs in areas away from those who might find smoke offensive is unlikely to be a decent reasonable human being. There should be no place for such narrow minded bigotry amongst health professionals and those who manage hospitals.
It is an indictment of the current government that such unreasonable divisive and uncaring behaviour has flourished rather than withered under its less than liberal leadership.
So your emailer would be perfectly happy with designated smoking areas away from the building then. Great stuff, I think we have reached a settlement we can all agree on!
Ministers, get on it sharpish.
Wouldn't that have no force in law? I understood that bans did not apply to open spaces and they could request but not force compliance. I also had grave warnings of post surgery problems, I had none and recovered very quickly. I also heal fast and my skin is very good for my age. I attended my local hospital last week and everyone was smoking outside on the grounds, not at the entrance. The nurses did go round the corner though. I am so sick of all this and still bemused that something considered normal just a few short years ago has come to this? Of course after 50 years of smoking I should be dead or at least ill.
The 2005 FORCES Report on Passive Smoking should be widely disseminated to legislators. Every MP, MSP, AM, MLA and MEP, as well as all Members of Congress and Senators in the US should receive this. It would also be worthwhile to update the report with additional data (new studies) on secondhand smoke, outdoor smoking bans, and e-cigarettes/vaping. The tobacco control mafia has corrupted the debate with false studies and propaganda. Their lock on information needs to be broken.
As a doctor of 24 years experience I used to approach young smokers with a blunt statement of the facts in order to persuade them to quit. Usually they were completely nonchalant about my efforts.
His 'blunt statement of facts' was in reality not 'facts' at all, but the propaganda he'd been indoctrinated with at medical school.
I had a client a couple of years ago who was a just-retired doctor, and we had some lively discussions about smoking, and the bullshit that surrounds it. I emailed him several links which basically destroyed the SHS fantasy, and several more which threw deep doubts on the veracity of the basic 'Smoking Kills' meme.
The next time I saw him, he thanked me for the links, and said he had done further research into the subject (I guess by following links from the links I'd sent him), and told me his faith in the medical profession had been severely shaken (although I think he'd had a sneaking suspicion that exaggeration was the order of the day).
"They constantly drummed the 'smoking = lung cancer = VERY BAD etc' message into us all through medical school", he said.
And he would have been at med school in the 1960s. So it's been going on for some while.
He had discovered much research on the internet that directly contradicted what he'd been led to believe, and he was a tad stunned by what he'd discovered.
He was amenable to my suggestions that he look at the links I sent him because he was a smoker (albeit a light social smoker) himself, and filled with guilt that he enjoyed it.
Anyway, the point of my witterings is that ALL medical people are indoctrinated constantly throughout medical school on the evils of smoking, so it is no surprise that your correspondent adopted the attitude he did. He's been brainwashed, and reacted in the only way he knew how.
It is us, the tax payers who pay for the health service. Therefore it cannot tell us how to live as it is supposed serve the general public. Fed up with this toxic dictatorship.
Given the woeful performance of the Welsh NHS to meet any of its targets for patient care, we now know why when they focus their attention (and our money) on hounding smokers. These people are an absolute disgrace!