The Freedom2Choose Official Blog

Your caring mental health team: they know what’s good for you

Last month Freedom2Choose received a distressing telephone call from a patient in a secure unit in a mental health hospital in England.

Using a payphone, and being both polite and perfectly logical, the patient told his story. He was compulsorily detained in a mental hospital, and was likely to be so for some time. The hospital was introducing a total outdoor smoking ban and the patients were opposed to it. All the units have an outdoor quadrangle where the patients have been smoking, but this too is to be banned. He was concerned that patients will take dangerous risks to attempt smoking.

We telephoned the MIND group in his area. The woman we spoke to was immensely sympathetic, and said that most of the people they ran services for smoked, and they wouldn’t dream of banning smoking outdoors in their premises. She agreed that it was a serious infringement of his rights and those of the other patients who smoked. She also confirmed that many patients who would previously have entered hospital voluntarily are now refusing to do so because they know they won’t be able to smoke. When, however, we got an email from her, she had softened her attitude (been leaned on?), and simply told us that they had asked the hospital and that the local NHS Hospital Trust had decided to ban smoking on the entire site, ‘for the health of the patients’.

So, this is the state we have ended up in. Someone finds themselves, sadly, suffering from a mental illness to such a serious degree that they need to be sectioned on a long-term basis. The mental illness has not been caused in any way by smoking: in fact, many patients find that smoking helps to take the edge off their illness.

The patronising response to this from the NHS is that for their own good, they will be banned from smoking while receiving treatment.

This adds to the patients’ distress, does nothing to help the reason they are in hospital, and in fact is preventing many patients from seeking the help they desperately need. The trust between a patient suffering from mental illness and those who should be caring for them has completely broken down, driven by this bloody all-consuming obsession with smoking cessation.

Anecdotally, we also know from some of our members who live near Rampton hospital and who have had conversations with staff who work there – where smoking was completely banned some years ago – who report in private that the biggest and growing health problem now faced by patients there is morbid obesity, not helped by the side effects of some anti-psychotic drugs – which wasn’t a problem before.

We were particularly interested, therefore, in this recent case from New Zealand. Waitemata District Health Board in Auckland has sparked off a legal review after banning smoking throughout its premises and grounds.

The suicide of an outpatient who refused to seek treatment due to the smoking ban at Hillmorton hospital in Christchurch has led to claims that smoking bans in hospitals are torture on patients who smoke.

Barrister Richard Francois said in his opening statement before the Judicial Review that according to the victim’s mother he enjoyed visiting the hospital prior to the ban, where he had admitted himself due to suicidal urges, until the smoking ban came into force. Smoking was an integral part of his life which was denied to him by hospital staff.

Francois further states that psychiatric patients are segregated, locked in rooms and denied freedom to smoke at a time when they are under stress, hauled away from families, friends and employment.

Mental Illness is a very tough event for those who suffer from it. It really does not matter what level it is at: it’s highly stressful not only for patients but their family and friends, and it is not their fault. Often the decision to smoke was taken when of ‘sound’ mind and not as a result of their illness.

So, by what right do the medical profession seek to cause further distress? Is it not bad enough that those of sound mind are relentlessly bullied, some pushed into depression, and that at least one medication prescribed to wean them off smoking actually creates suicidal urges, without the medical profession torturing those whose minds may already be shattered by removing one of the few free choices that they can make, and that brings them relief?

It’s time to put the caring back into the caring profession. Angry? Damn right we are. What the hell is going on here?

H/T John Watson &”sheenadon”.

 F2C warned you last year that the devolution of Public Health to local councils was going to impact severely on freedoms. We also fervently encouraged you to get re-involved locally. What we didn’t notice was that a creeping insidious mean little law was introduced in last week’s Queen’s Speech, which will probably have even more impact than the devolution of Public Health.

This is the ‘Public Spaces Protection Order’. A big hat tip to Josie Appleton from spikedonline for the information, and to F2C’s ‘Tony’ for spotting it.

Public Spaces Protection Orders (PSPO) will replace alcohol-control zones (Designated Public Space Orders). These new, much broader orders can be used to ban any activity and can also impose positive conditions, requiring people to do something rather than simply refrain from an activity. The local authority can obtain this order if it judges that the activity in question has a ‘detrimental effect’ on the ‘quality of life’ in an area; or, if the activity has not yet been carried out, that it is likely to be carried out and is likely to have a detrimental effect. Given local authorities’ apparent dislike of most social activities, this could have a wide application.

This could make the little Stoney Stratford parish council attempt at banning open air smoking look like a fairy tale.

The new legislation can and will be seized upon by every tinpot public health dictator throughout the country.  We can look forward to bans on drinking, smoking, and eating unhealthy food in public.

The new health era is coming to your area soon. Get ready.

 Well, we did it! All of us.Together.

Not only was legislation on plain packaging dropped from the Queen’s Speech this morning – but also legislation on minimum pricing for alcohol – and additionally on what was termed the ‘Snoopers’ Charter’.

David Cameron has told ministers that the Queen’s speech marks a “ruthless” attempt to refocus the work of the government on hardworking families as Downing Street removes what the Tories’ new campaign director, Lynton Crosby, dubbed “the barnacles off the boat” of its legislative programme.

The prime minister has made clear that omissions from the Queen’s speech, such as a minimum price for alcohol and plain packaging for cigarettes, are designed to streamline the work of the government as it battles to secure economic recovery.

It seems a small step, but it’s definitely going in the right direction, and may just be the first sign of a long-overdue “Smoking Spring”. Huge congratulations and thanks to Angela Harbutt and the HOOPS team.

I think quite a few of us may be holding a little celebration later today.

On April 1st 2013, the provision of stop smoking services and campaigns passed from the NHS to local councils. This will mean them spending a considerable amount of taxpayer’s money on useless (NRT – Note 1) and dangerous (Champix – Note 2) pharmaceutical products, not to mention likely anti-smoking advertising campaigns. For example it has been reported that Croydon council is planning an annual spend of £900,000.

On 2nd of May 2013 there are local council elections throughout England and Wales, although not in London or Croydon as it happens. While Freedom2Choose is not aligned to any political party and does not take a stance either for or against any party, we do applaud when a politician recognises the need for common-sense.

So now is the time to ask questions of your local candidates.

Note 1:  http://freedom2choose.info/news_viewer.php?id=969 and
http://www.tobaccoanalysis.blogspot.co.uk/2009/04/new-study-demonstrates-how-conflicts-of.html

Note 2:  http://www.mlive.com/business/west-michigan/index.ssf/2013/03/report_anti-smoking_drug_lawsu.html

Scientists in general and epidemiologists in particular are on trial. At stake are their reputations and their good names. In fact it is far more serious than that: the reputation of higher education is also at risk. The fallout from junk science will undermine and discredit both scientists and universities worldwide.

Second Hand Smoke, also known as Environmental Tobacco Smoke (ETS), is proving to be very lucrative  for scientists and universities, but not for the working people whose livelihoods depended on bars staying open, and not for taxpayers who find themselves paying ever-increasing tax bills to support an ever-growing unemployment line.

So who says Second Hand Smoke science is fraudulent? It seems to be the view of the Brussels Declaration whose conclusion in part states:

“No epidemiological study has ever measured actual lifetime doses of ETS, nor lifetime exposures to ETS. No study has determined the recall bias of people with lung cancer. No study could guarantee that some self-declared non-smokers were in fact or had been smokers. No study could exclude the possibility that the lung cancers observed might have been caused by many known lung cancer risks and thus not by ETS. Plausible publication biases were not accounted for. Most studies did not report statistical differences of risk, and some implied a reduction of risk. In a nutshell, the primary data, their statistical analyses, and the claimed lung cancer risks of epidemiological studies of ETS are illusory-, and by extension the ETS risks claimed by the SRG are equally illusory.”

Yet the Tobacco Control Industry has forced through legislation based on such studies!

In opening we said that both scientists and universities could lose their reputations and their good name. The case we want to draw attention to is that of Enstrom v University of California. At the heart of this is the dismissal of Professor James Enstrom and the forfeiture of his research grants. As the case is currently sub-judice it would be improper to refer to the actual proceedings, although Carl Phillips has published some background information.

Professor Enstrom was half of the team (the co-writer being Professor Geoffrey C. Kabat) who wrote an epidemiological study published in the British Medical Journal in July 2003. The paper – which stated that there was actually no harm from Second Hand Smoke – was criticised by Stanton Glantz of Action on Smoking and Health (and also a member of the faculty at the University of California),who attempted but failed to have the paper removed from the BMJ. The full story of the attempts to censor the Enstrom/Kabat paper is to be found here.

For further reading, see Enstrom’s website The Scientific Integrity Institute.

A guest post by Tanya

(This is Tanya’s personal story, in her own words.)

There have been a number of times when doctors have been proven to be wrong: could this be another case of doctors saying what they are told to say by the powers that be?

After giving up smoking I was admitted to hospital with a cardiac arrhythmia, known as atrial fibrillations. On my doctor’s advice and through fear I decided not to start smoking again in case it made my heart worse. However after getting lots of strange beats I thought ‘Well, I like a smoke and my heart’s gammy anyway, so I may as well smoke.’ So I started again.

After taking up smoking again I found my heart condition actually improved. Amazed by this, I decided to ask around in my online cardiac support group for people with hearts just like mine just how many were smokers and ex smokers. One lady emailed me in response to say she smoked around 5 a day and it helped her heart (not to have so many freaky beats). Another woman emailed to say since giving up smoking, her arrhythmia had started up again. The best case was that of a man in the group (he has the worst heart out of all of us on the site, regularly suffering from a number of arrhythmias) who said his condition got much worse after he decided to stop smoking.

The cardiac support site is not the only place I have found people like this: there are my neighbours, one an ex-smoker while the other had given up for a little while. He has asthma, yet when he gave up his wife was very concerned that she may lose him. His asthma got very bad; he had a cough he couldn’t get rid of; he had symptoms of vagus nerve damage, and he also had a number of days off work and that is not like him. After a while he decided, as I did, that maybe smoking wasn’t such a bad idea. He now smokes again and while he is smoking he has very few – almost no – issues. His wife gave up smoking many years ago and since giving up her health has become very much worse, leaving her with more health complaints than it’s possible to list here. Her main complaint though is fibromyalgia.

These conditions suffered by all the people above are cases where the symptoms can be traced back to the vagus nerve. This nerve controls involuntary organ function and motor function such as heart rate, swallowing, breathing and digestive functions.

For those where the vagus nerve is damaged or inflamed, smoking could actually be more beneficial. The vagus nerve can be damaged in many ways: scar tissue caused by injury or other problems, direct damage or even a very nasty ear nose or throat infection can cause the vagus nerve to become inflamed or damaged. It can also be damaged at birth and the person will not know about it until after many wrong diagnoses and treatment of individual conditions. Sometimes they never get a correct diagnosis.

Nicotine acts as a natural anti inflammatory, and this anti-inflammatory effect could be what is stopping arrhythmia patients, asthma patients and fibromyalgia patients among many others, including gastric patients, getting worse. Fibromyalgia, arrhythmia, asthma and even depression can be traced as symptoms of vagus nerve damage. Stimulating this nerve or helping it become less inflamed by smoking could help reduce the symptoms of the conditions and in some cases almost rid the person of the symptoms better than prescription medications.

It’s my theory that doctors are misdiagnosing people as it’s easier to push a pill at someone, give them a nice diagnosis for what they have and keep them dependent on the system for their drugs etc. When for many, simply a nerve has been damaged, and this is easy to treat in a few ways but the government would rather have us more dependent on the system. This is shown by the amount of money they are injecting into stopping people smoking: after all we are losing millions in tax revenue stopping people smoking and the NHS is paying out more millions on drugs to stop you smoking.

I ask you why the government don’t seem to care about your health, and for the few patients that get sick from smoking the bill must be a lot less than that of losing billions to stop a few people getting sick: they appear to want us hooked on drugs we will keep having to pay for!

Yet more policy-led evidence?

‘Science has become a political football to be controlled to stage-manage advocacy for a pre-set agenda. We can’t afford it to be’, says Dave Atherton, as he takes us through a number of examples in his latest article in The Commentator.

Today we link to a recent essay by Professor John Brignell. It is well worth reading in full. Here are the first two paragraphs:

In the dark ages literacy was a secret jealously guarded by the senior clerics. It gave them power in the monopoly of handing down the written and immutable law; and, incidentally, enabled them to conceal their errors (and perversions) of interpretation. The lower clergy were only able to copy documents as arrays of symbols without intrinsic meaning, but God-given, and their errors propagated (such as confusing the Gothic long “s” with “f”).

In these days of almost universal literacy (of sorts) there is an analogy in the case of statistical literacy, though not one to be taken too far. The senior clergy understand statistics (to a patchy extent) and use or abuse them at will. The junior clergy put in numbers and extract them from computer packages, without understanding, and pass them on. The laity know their place, but are impressed.

Full Essay here:  http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/statistical_bludgeon.htm

We also heartily recommend his website, books and other essays for further reading:

Website:  http://www.numberwatch.co.uk

Books: ‘Sorry, Wrong Number!‘ and ‘The epidemiologists‘  http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/book.htm

Essays: ‘March of the zealots‘   http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/zealots.htm

And finally: ‘The complete list of things that give you cancer (according to epidemiologists)‘.http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/cancer%20list.htm

So, they ignored the consultation, then? Quelle surprise.

Story just in from The Guardian. Says will be announced in May.

Go to story here.

Another article in The Commentator from F2C’s Chairman, Dave Atherton; this time, on second-hand smoke.

He says:

The accusations are that second hand smoke (SHS) leads to “cot death (sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS), asthma, lower respiratory infections, glue ear, bacterial meningitis as well as coughs and wheezes.”

This is no more than the triumph of faith over science, in this case creating a platform of prejudice, intolerance and bigotry against smokers. The Department of health (DH), the BMA and other anti-smoker groups are fabricating evidence, called publication or wish biases. The perversion of science knows no limits.

For full article, go here.