Leave Smokers Alone

I volunteer at a hospital. I work there for free four hours each week. I help in the Ambulatory Care Center where people are staged before going into surgery and again before they are discharged. It is a nice community hospital. They have about 100 beds. They are part of a larger national system.

They are going smoke free next month. Right now they have a few designated places for smokers to go and get a nicotine fix. But this, too, will soon disappear.

The CDC lists smoking related deaths without actually checking to see if the death is truly related to any smoking. If the corpse had certain lung diseases, then the death is attributed to smoking regardless of whether or not the person actually ever smoked. This is usually called bad data.

Based on the CDC data, all sorts of smoking regulations are put into place. Smoking "causes cancer" but not everyone who smokes gets cancer so this is suspect. There is a laundry list of diseases with secondhand smoke. Now, if smoking cannot cause cancer, how does secondhand smoke cause cancer?

Smoking stinks. It is dirty. It is a nasty habit. You are better off not smoking. Smoking exacerbates certain lung problems and increases your possibility of getting lung cancer. The nicotine also causes vasoconstriction and makes circulatory diseases like stroke and heart attacks more likely. Smoking is not good for you and never has been.

There is a national epidemic that is increasing in size as we speak – or as I type. Morbid obesity is more and more prevalent. Each fat person is at risk for a host of health problems beginning with diabetes and all the secondary issues that come with that disease as well as that pesky stroke and heart attack thing that smokers are scared to death about. Then there is joint disease, strain on internal organs and resulting liver and kidney disease which is also exacerbated by diabetes.

All in all it is very unhealthy to be fat. Very unhealthy. In fact, being obese has more deleterious effects than smoking.

So what is the hospital doing about obesity? More and more of the staff are fat – grossly fat. I look around at the people waddling through the hallways and am amazed that they even make scrubs that large. We have to get special gowns for the obese patients. The OR tables have been "improved" with better hydraulics because more people are heavier and need the tables that will raise 450 pounds.

And the cafeteria is still selling sugar water in the form of Coke or Pepsi products. There is a vending machine that has high fat sandwiches – breakfast or lunch style. They serve high fat meals that are oozing in grease. I don't eat there but I have walked through the line just to look. There is a salad bar but it isn't all vegetables. Even at the healthy section there is cheese, croutons, sunflower seeds, and high fat dressings.

It is much easier to pick on smokers. It is less easy to make healthy and delicious meals. A slice of cheese and pepperoni pizza is easier and more Americans are liable to choose it. However, both staff and patients are way too fat and the hospital should address that issue before totally banning smoking anywhere on the campus.

If I were a smoking patient, I would take my business elsewhere. If I were smoking staff, I guess I would have to walk out to the sidewalk to smoke and wouldn't that be a lovely advertisement for the hospital that looked like it was on strike. That, and the smokers would be gone away from their work stations for even longer than just having to duck into a Butt Hut somewhere, burn one, and get back to work.

I suppose it looks good on paper. Hospital Doing Something About Health. Dumb asses.