From my website blog
From an esteemed journal such as the New York Times I would expect better than this: A Hot Debate Over E-Cigarettes as a Path to Tobacco, or From It but then shock coverage seems to be all we get these days.
What, on first glance, might seem to be a balanced coverage of the facts provides very little other than yet more anecdotal evidence.
When I read things like "Pessimists like Dr. Glantz say that while e-cigarettes might be good in theory, they are bad in practice. The vast majority of people who smoke them now also smoke conventional cigarettes, he said, and there is little evidence that much switching is happening" I want to cry.
Glantz is a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. A professor who can throw out glib, unsupported comments with no reference to fact. Not one mention of research.
If we are going to debate the efficacy of vaping through anecdote then why not take a look at the many online forums now dedicated to the pastime? Why not look to the 8,000 members of POTV, 99% have completely given up cigarettes? Why not look to Youtube to see the benefits being extolled by Justin Sullivan, singer with the band New Model Army?
http://youtu.be/8O_zDrt1HBI
I'll throw this out there, the reason Glantz is so reliant on anecdote is that reference to actual research destroys his position. And his position is reliant on funding, in a University struggling with its finances (Source) having had to slash one billion dollars from its budget (Source).
More than that, its position of the leading recipient of biomedical research grants has to maintained (Source). It's just not in his interest to bite the hand that feeds.
I'm not a professional journalist but it has taken me a matter of minutes to unearth this information. It's not hard to track down the pioneering, peer-reviewed research work being carried out by Dr. Konstantinos Farsalinos or the evidence contained at Ecigarette Research.
Thank goodness for the likes of Dr. Michael Siegel, a public health researcher at Boston University. While arguing that e-cigarettes could be the end of smoking in America, he provides the wonderful analogy of likening the effect ecigs will have to that of the computer to the typewriter.
"Sales of e-cigarettes more than doubled last year from 2012, to $1.7 billion, according to Bonnie Herzog, an analyst at Wells Fargo Securities. Ms. Herzog said that in the next decade, consumption of e-cigarettes could outstrip that of conventional cigarettes. The number of stores that sell them has quadrupled in just the last year, according to the Smoke Free Alternatives Trade Association, an e-cigarette industry trade group."
The world is turning Professor Glantz - if you really want to secure funding then it's high time you looked to the future instead of blindly clinging onto the past.
From an esteemed journal such as the New York Times I would expect better than this: A Hot Debate Over E-Cigarettes as a Path to Tobacco, or From It but then shock coverage seems to be all we get these days.
What, on first glance, might seem to be a balanced coverage of the facts provides very little other than yet more anecdotal evidence.
When I read things like "Pessimists like Dr. Glantz say that while e-cigarettes might be good in theory, they are bad in practice. The vast majority of people who smoke them now also smoke conventional cigarettes, he said, and there is little evidence that much switching is happening" I want to cry.
Glantz is a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. A professor who can throw out glib, unsupported comments with no reference to fact. Not one mention of research.
If we are going to debate the efficacy of vaping through anecdote then why not take a look at the many online forums now dedicated to the pastime? Why not look to the 8,000 members of POTV, 99% have completely given up cigarettes? Why not look to Youtube to see the benefits being extolled by Justin Sullivan, singer with the band New Model Army?
http://youtu.be/8O_zDrt1HBI
I'll throw this out there, the reason Glantz is so reliant on anecdote is that reference to actual research destroys his position. And his position is reliant on funding, in a University struggling with its finances (Source) having had to slash one billion dollars from its budget (Source).
More than that, its position of the leading recipient of biomedical research grants has to maintained (Source). It's just not in his interest to bite the hand that feeds.
I'm not a professional journalist but it has taken me a matter of minutes to unearth this information. It's not hard to track down the pioneering, peer-reviewed research work being carried out by Dr. Konstantinos Farsalinos or the evidence contained at Ecigarette Research.
Thank goodness for the likes of Dr. Michael Siegel, a public health researcher at Boston University. While arguing that e-cigarettes could be the end of smoking in America, he provides the wonderful analogy of likening the effect ecigs will have to that of the computer to the typewriter.
"Sales of e-cigarettes more than doubled last year from 2012, to $1.7 billion, according to Bonnie Herzog, an analyst at Wells Fargo Securities. Ms. Herzog said that in the next decade, consumption of e-cigarettes could outstrip that of conventional cigarettes. The number of stores that sell them has quadrupled in just the last year, according to the Smoke Free Alternatives Trade Association, an e-cigarette industry trade group."
The world is turning Professor Glantz - if you really want to secure funding then it's high time you looked to the future instead of blindly clinging onto the past.
