Lung Cancer and the Power of Suggestion

<i>Were there millions of depressed people in hiding, in 1955, waiting to come out of the closet in the 1990s? Was 9.3% of the American adult population (the percentage now suffering depression) merely suffering in silence, back in 1955? Or did the drug companies and their media flacks convert a relatively rare psychological condition into a growth industry through massive advertising and media hype (in other words, through the power of suggestion)?</i><p>The author is trying to claim that many (most/majority?) cases of depression are made up and hyped. They are trying to claim that it's <i>impossible</i> for there to be that many actual depressed people now.<p>But turn it around. How many (openly) gay people/couples are there today? Millions! But there weren't that many in 1955! So what happened? Was it all media hype? &#60;sarcasm&#62;Or are we expected to believe that all those gay people were suffering in silence in the 1950s?!&#60;/sarcasm&#62;.<p>Of course all the gay people were suffering in silence in the 50s. People don't doubt that. So why the doubt about mental illness?

It appears you've made some sort of resolution to publish and promote a blog entry per day in 2013. 40 entries in 41 days this year vs. 46 in all of 2012. You should reconsider - whatever your reasons were, I doubt they included a desire to develop a reputation for presenting topics that were sensationalized and thinly researched [1] produced with a pace that ensures discredited theories dont get reviewed.<p>[1] <a href="http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2013/02/drug-companies-stop-hiding-your-data.html" rel="nofollow">http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2013/02/drug-companies-stop-h...</a>

"Do Cigarette Warning Labels Help CAUSE Cancer?" No... Long answer: Hell no and stop doing this.<p>To the next person with a pseudoscientific gut-feeling-bear-with-me-just-a-bit-while-I-pull-a-half-baked-idea-out-of-a-number-set-that-does-nothing-to-corroborate, please don't. Corrolation doesn't equate to causation, no matter what amount of reality bending assertions you apply. Warning those at high risk for cancer know they're at high risk and subsequently confirm the hypothesis doesn't mean the warning was the cause.

<i>In 1955, only 38,200 people in the U.S, were in mental hospitals as a result of disablement due to depression (C. Silverman, 1968, The Epidemiology of Depression, Johns Hopkins Press). Today, depression is the leading cause of disability in the U.S. for people aged 15-44 (according to NIMH stats). Depression now affects 20.5 million American adults: 14.8 million in the form of major depressive disorder and 5.7 million in the form of bipolar disorder. That's a pretty huge jump in numbers: 38,200 to 20 million.</i><p>He's comparing the number of of people <i>insitutionalized in a mental hospital</i> in 1955 to the total number of people who suffer from depression in the United States now. How is that comparison even relevant to anything? How many people are institutionalized for depression now? My guess is that those numbers either wouldn't support his narrative or can't be found in a few minutes of googling like the rest of his "research".<p>Also notice how he gets to 20 million (a very dramatic number indeed) by adding together 14.8 million suffering from a major depressive disorder and 5.7 million in the form of bipolar disorder. Are those thing mutually exclusive?

If there IS a nocebo effect here, it's mildly implausible that it would have a really narrow effect like "making people more susceptible to lung cancer". At a minimum, I'd expect them to be more susceptible to other cancers, and possibly other diseases and illnesses (the big fat warnings in your face, and having to bypass them to smoke, acting as some sort of immunosuppressant or something like that).<p>Perhaps, if this effect is real, further research could demonstrate that? Or perhaps there's still a confounding effect somewhere, maybe something related to how people self-select whether they're going to smoke and some factor which is correlated both with making that decision in the face of a big fat warning label <i>and</i> with increased susceptibility to lung cancer?<p>Anyway. Nice idea for a research paper. Not sure it belongs here until you've done more though. :P

I don't understand why it's so infeasible that improvements in cigarette technology could result in cigarettes that are worse for one's health because they've been more aggressively optimised for tar content as officially measured, or shelf life, or cost of manufacture.<p>As for the theory that modern smokers simply suck harder, I'm not sure that's so implausible. Light cigarettes are more common today, and most light cigarettes seem to get their lightness entirely from lengthier filters that have small holes in the paper. (If you use the tobacco for some other purpose, e.g., as filler for an unfiltered marijuana cigarette, then you'll find the smoke just as harsh and the roach paper no less tarry.) This requires a more forceful draw to avoid that unpleasant "sucking in air" sensation.<p>I've also noticed, on the occasions that I've checked recently, that cigarettes today tend to have lower advertised tar and nicotine content than the ones I smoked as a teenager. So perhaps that could result in a similar effect.

Can we please get this website hell-banned?<p>Every single article posted by techdog is an article from this blog, and every single one of these articles is factually and demonstrably wrong, written by someone who has very little understanding of statistical analysis or any of the specific topics the article purport to address.

The first article graph of woman lung cancer rates raises some red flags - a huge increase in woman lung cancer caused by cigarettes would be expected a couple of decades after the huge increase in woman (as opposed to mostly-male) smoking in first half of 20th century.<p>In order for that graph to facilitate truth instead of misleading, it needs to include either (a) woman smoking rates by year, or (b) male lung cancer rates, not woman.

Seems more like an variation of what psych and behavioral economics calls the "what the hell" effect than "power of suggestion". "What the hell" effect says once your willpower fails and you give into temptation to begin doing negative behaviors, you are much more likely to go all in (think eating a single donut on a diet then polishing off the box). By making the cancer threat real post purchase and reminding of the ultimate consequence every time you light up, they may be pushing people to throw their hands up and just keep smoking.<p>Of course, like this article, this is just a untested theory I pulled out of my ass.

I'm not sure how the article goes from interesting hypothesis (which it is) to near certainty.<p>&#62;If we rule out changes in cigaret design and environmental factors as explanations for the enormous increase in lung cancer, what are we left with?<p>Seems like a false dichotomy to me. It can't be X, so it has to be Y.<p>&#62;All of these would affect smokers and non-smokers equally. And yet lung cancer rates have not gone up for non-smokers.<p>This isn't necessarily true. It could be a synergistic effect, where some external factor increases cancer rates when smoking is also involved.

Or, very simply, life expectancy has increased significantly during this time period. Since, "Of course, it takes years of smoking to get lung cancer", more people live to the age where they get lung cancer.

What about the use of additives in cigarettes that started around the 1960s? From wikipedia on 'cigarette': "According to data from the World Health Organization,[40] the amount of tobacco per 1000 cigarettes fell from 2.28 pounds in 1960 to 0.91 pounds in 1999, largely as a result of reconstituting tobacco, fluffing and additives."

Maybe as smoking went from an "everyone" activity to a more marginalized activity, you get worse health outcomes in that group for other reasons.<p>How does the fitness of the median smoker today compare to the fitness of the median smoker in the 1950s? What about wealth, access to treatment, etc?

One other explanation I can think of for higher lung cancer rates is that people are living longer, so more likely to succumb to cancer in the end.<p>But like someone else said, the idea that these trends have not been examined and explained to death by better-informed people is risible.

The only problem I see here is his argument about placebos - while the placebo effect is a strong one (and I believe in it), there is a current lack of control over placebos (I e sometimes drug companies try to use placebos that cause side affects) that are currently used in the industry. Otherwise. This is an interesting idea.

I am curious about "cigaret," wiktionary says it is a dated form of cigarette.<p>I have trouble looking at the graph without being distracted by "cigaret" but firefox's dictionary is not marking it as a misspelling so it must be accepted somewhere. Where is this spelling still commonplace?

Or it could be all the coal burning pollution catching up to us?

Or you know, people who have smoked is more likely to have kids with cancer or who where second-hand smokers at an age they can't remember now.<p>Also, campaigns against brest cancer had an exponential grow too but somehow the rate of breast cancer is about the same, or do your hypothesis includes lungs being more affected by perceptions than any other organ?