Cancer is undoubtedly the largest
health concern of smoking. The public is led to believe that smoking is the
single biggest preventable cause of the disease and that 50% of smokers will
die from it. Not so readily admitted is the fact that about 50% of non-smokers
will die from cancer too. There is a
large body of work to show that smoking causes cancer. Cancer Research UK states that “In the UK, smoking kills five times
more people than road accidents, overdoses, murder, suicide and HIV all put
together.” and “Smoking
and passive smoking cause nine out of ten lung cancers.”[1] Of
course, no reference or citation is given for either statement.
Before going
any further I would like to include an excerpt from an article written by Dr
Siepmann, M.D. writing for the Journal of Theoretics:[2]
…smoking does not cause lung cancer. It
is only one of many risk factors for lung cancer. I initially was going to
write an article on how the professional literature and publications misuse the
language by saying "smoking causes lung cancer"1,2, but
the more that I looked into how biased the literature, professional
organizations, and the media are, I modified this article to one on trying to
put the relationship between smoking and cancer into perspective.
Dr Siepmann makes a point that
many forget: ‘cause’ and ‘factor’ are different things. For example, striking a match and putting it
to paper will cause a fire; a cause is a sequence of events that will lead to a
definite outcome. A factor, on the other
hand, is when an action may possibly cause an outcome.
[1]http://info.cancerresearchuk.org/healthyliving/smokingandtobacco/?a=5441
[2]http://www.journaloftheoretics.com/Editorials/Vol-1/e1-4.htm