Would you agree that smoking is causally related to lung cancer ? Yes .
Like most of the day , on some level , I sit around thinking about causality . And I think the hardest part about studying medicine with respect to human beings is how difficult it is to infer causality for most things that we do So if you believe that smoking is causally related to lung cancer , then smoking cessation reduces the probability of lung cancer . That is a , that is a logical equivalency .
You tell them it's time to stop . Is that a logical approach to treating smoking and lung cancer ? Or would be better to say , given that we know cigarettes are causally related to this ?
Um , just because something is causal doesn't mean it's , you're , you're guaranteed to get it . There are smokers who don't get lung cancer . So , you know , there's gonna be somebody listening to this who says my , my grandmother is 95 years old .
No , I do not . In other words , you believe that smoking causes lung cancer , then yes , I mean , there are a number of mechanistic steps in between . I mean , if somebody was really want to get uh to , you know , drill into the logic , they could say , OK , it's not actually the smoking , it's a , you know , some uh uh disruption of the endothelial cell lining that , you know , smoking triggers that , that triggers that .
