[rauhl]

> There is no such thing as a "healthy" use of cigarettes.

I don’t think that’s really true. The health effects of a cigarette a week would be indistinguishable from background noise.

The fundamental problem with cigarettes is that they are addictive, and convenient (at one time very convenient), and so it’s easy to smoke more and more. That’s actually very similar to smartphones: their use is addictive, and convenient (you can get a hit at work, in line, in the car, at the store, walking down the street, in bed).

As with tobacco, I believe that the answer is to responsibly use smartphones. Chain-smoking is bad; so too is constantly getting a hit from your smartphone. Smoking a pipe a couple of times a week (or a cigar a couple of times a month) isn’t a problem, and neither is using a smartphone intentionally & deliberately.

[jrockway]

I don't think cell phones cause lung cancer or emphysema. The better comparison is to caffeine. Yeah, it's pretty addictive. But it doesn't kill you. That's about where the cell phone is for some people. (And hey, the blue light even screws up your sleep cycle supposedly. As a long-time drinker of caffeine, I don't even HAVE a sleep cycle! Take that, cell phones.)

Also, I am guessing that most doctors would not recommend smoking a pipe a couple times a week. I doubt it's harmless.

[erikpukinskis]

Cell phone addiction absolutely causes life threatening risks, like stress, isolation, attention deficit, etc.

[rootusrootus]

Pipes are basically nothing in comparison with cigarettes, though.

My dad's doctor didn't quite recommend he start smoking his pipe again, but he didn't really try to dissuade him, either. It enhances his experience and he's old enough that any remaining cares about cancer are moot.

[throwaway413]

> I don’t think that’s really true. The health effects of a cigarette a week would be indistinguishable from background noise.

Is this true? Can you provide a source?

Brb running to the corner store...

[Scaevolus]

The exposure to air pollution from living in a city can be equated to number of cigarettes in terms of cancer risks. Living in San Francisco is about 1/3 cigarette a day, with an average PM2.5 of around 8ug/m^3.

https://www.citylab.com/environment/2018/04/how-much-are-you...

http://www.baaqmd.gov/~/media/files/communications-and-outre...

[oarabbus_]

I think you'll find a hard time finding any source which will claim cigarette smoking under some threshold is not bad for you.

But keep in mind cigarette studies use the metric "pack-years" where 1 pack-year means smoking 20 cigarettes a day, for a year. "Heavy" smokers are generally considered as 2+ pack-year smokers. And it's not like _every_ heavy smoker gets lung cancer. In fact "only" 25% of heavy smokers get lung cancer, 5% of "former smokers", and 0.5% of non-smokers get lung cancer. And 40 cigarettes a day is a LOT!

So you can do an extrapolation with the numbers above to estimate a conclusion. I'd be hard-pressed to believe that 1 cigarette per WEEK is even as harmful as living in a big city like NYC or SF.

[Pharmakon]

How many of the ones who don’t get lung cancer also don’t suffer from elevetates rates of bronchial infection, cardiovascular symptoms, COPD or emphysema? How many avoid cancers related to smoking other than lung cancer?

[oarabbus_]

I'd wager that drinking soda daily is more harmful to your health than one single cigarette per week.

[Pharmakon]

The equivalent amount of soda per day that would equate to one cigarette per week? I’d take that bet.

[oarabbus_]

No, one can of soda daily, vs one cigarette smoked per week.

[otabdeveloper2]

Lung cancer is the least of your problems if you're a smoker.

Smoking greatly increases risks of literally every possible health condition.

(This is why the first question you'll be asked by a doctor is if you smoke or not, no matter what your complaint is.)

[oarabbus_]

>Smoking greatly increases risks of literally every possible health condition.

Actually, cigarette smoking can reduce the incidence of diabetes, metabolic syndrome, endometrial cancer, and Parkinson's, to name a few.

No, I'm not claiming cigarette smoking is good for you. I acknowledge it's very bad for you.

But if you point me towards two people, one who smokes "one cigarette a week" and does light exercise, and a second individual who is sedentary, and drinks alcohol and soda regularly, I'd wager most of my net worth that the 1-cigarette-per-week individual is far healthier. It's possible for something to be very bad for you AND also for the dangers to be overblown.

[yesenadam]

>Smoking greatly increases risks of literally every possible health condition.

Is that actually true? Somehow I doubt it, but I'm open to reading research (or whatever) on the question. (I'm taking you literally because you specifically wrote "literally", but maybe you didn't mean it...literally)

[Obi_Juan_Kenobi]

Medical consensus for most toxins/poisons is LNT - linear no threshold.

The basic idea is that you can perform some interventions at various doses, score the response, and then extrapolate to the origin. In most cases, simple linear regression gets you close to the origin, suggesting a linear response where even small doses has small harmful effects.

The trouble with this is that the data is rarely good enough to really support that model directly, instead you have to extrapolate the data to these smaller doses. This is simply due to variance in the data and errors in experimentation that make small effect sizes extremely hard to suss out. So you're always extrapolating from more extreme data.

For instance, a great deal of fuss has been made about alcohol, and whether moderate consumption (on the order of one drink a day) is actually beneficial. More broadly, this is related to the idea of hormesis, where small exposure to a poison actually confers a benefit, generally explained as coming from a compensatory response in the body. Every so often someone comes out with a new study or meta analysis that claims to be authoritative, but I still remain unconvinced one way or the other about alcohol.

________

The other issue here is the idea of relative risk. Even if you posit a non-zero harm from infrequent smoking, there are still many 'acceptable' risks that are likely far greater, such as that of road travel, air quality hazards, poor diet, lack of exercise, etc. These are all well understood and clearly outweigh the risk of infrequent smoking, but are 'business as usual', while a great deal of attention is paid to something like smoking, however infrequent.

In that sense, I would agree that it indistinguishable from background noise. But I would also say that there is likely real harm that results from this. In a broader decision-making sense, such minor harms do have a cumulative impact.

[cmiles74]

I wonder if some people are built such that they can't just put the phone down, similar to how many people really struggle to quit smoking. For those people there may be no "healthy" was to use the product.

[johnkpaul]

Interesting! This is very similar to how I feel about carbohydrates. Some people get addicted but an extremely small portion of the population. I never thought about there being analogues to other non-nutrition related addictive things.

[sigi45]

But my 'hit' are alarms, communication with family, news, emails etc

I prefer reading emails on my way. I'm distracted anyway and when I arrive at work, no emails anymore.