How dangerous is smoking a little bit?
Medel (and OP) — I’ve had a lot of doctor’s visits lately because I’m getting middle-aged and my health isn’t what I’d like. One of the possible contributing factors is my two-three pipes per month habit. I voiced this concern to my doctor. For what it’s worth, he actually laughed and then told me that a pipe a week was nothing to worry about. Five cigarettes a day, on the other hand, is not light smoking. It’s 35x the amount I smoke, and my doctor may have cautioned me if my habit were at that level.
Risk comparisons are notoriously difficult to make, especially for risks that are fairly low. I was once giving a lecture on the risk of contracting AIDS from visiting an HIV-infected dentist, and looking for comparable risks (in terms of epidemiology) were eating a peanut butter sandwich every day (aflotoxin), living in NYC for a year (pollution), and living near a nuclear power plant. Our psychology interprets risk in a very multi-dimensional way, including all kinds of factors that don’t relate to the actual risks. For example, you probably underestimate the risks of cigarette smoking, because you believe you can stop when you want, and you believe that the bad outcome is far enough off that it’s hard to believe it will really occur (compared to the reward which occurs immediately). Paul Slovic is a very readable and excellent author about these issues. There is no question that smoking is related to all kinds of bad health outcomes. He
tcskpetic: Yeah, you’re right: I was being a bit judgmental. I apologize. I guess what struck me was that you seemed interested in the health risks of smoking, but not that interested, which is an odd sort of stance to take. Many of my friends are or have been smokers, and the lengths they’ve gone to in order to rationalize their smoking (I only smoke on weekends; I never buy my own cigs; I only smoke when I drink) never fail(s/ed) to impress/baffle me. To me, five cigarettes a day is not “a little.” Obviously, you know smoking is bad for you – otherwise you wouldn’t’ve asked this question. You also already more or less knew the answer: smoking less is not as bad for you as smoking more, but it’s still fairly bad for you. I guess it just sounded to me like what you were really asking was, “How can I quit?” I may be – and probably am – totally off base here, and I admit it may be partly selfish: I find cigarettes repulsive. One less smoker in the world means that the chance of my having
