What is your doctor's opinion on cigar smoking

[edameff]

Pete and Baragh, thanks for your comments. It's difficult to explain this information, which is pretty complicated, in a brief way.

Baragh is correct in that when I said that the results were not "significant", it means that they were not statistically significant, which means they very well could have occurred by chance. An apparent difference can occur completely by chance. For example, if you flip a coin 100 times, it SHOULD come out 50 heads, and 50 tails, if the coin is fair. But in reality you could very easily get a finding that on 51 flips you get heads, and on 49 flips you get tails. This would be a 2% difference, but we shouldn't conclude that the coin is prone to produce heads. With another 100 flips you could get different results. So statisticians have produced tables of probability that are used to determine the likelihood that a given difference might be due completely to chance. Conventionally, researchers use a standard that there should be less than a 5% chance that the finding could occur by chance before we accept it as a "significant" difference.

In my commentary, I noted the following: "For example people who smoke 1-2 cigars per day have a risk ratio of 1.02 compared to nonsmokers, or 2% increase, but the 95% confidence interval crosses the number 1.0, indicating that the 1-2 cigar a day group's risk compared to nonsmokers is not statistically different. Note that the risk ratio for coronary heart disease for those smoking 1-2 cigars a day is .98, meaning a 2% LOWER risk of CHD. This is also not statistically significant." That 2% higher death rate in the 1-2 cigars per day group, just like the 2% LOWER risk of developing coronary heart disease, is such a small difference that it could have occurred by chance. If we don't use this kind of probability statement we would conclude from this article that smoking 1-2 cigars a day decreases rates of coronary heart disease.

While this study has limitations, it is the strongest study that I have found. The research finds no statistically significant differences between nonsmokers and people smoking 1-2 cigars per day on any of the indicators of death or cancer and other diseases. There may be such differences, but they must be very small, so small that this study could not detect them.

As I noted, there may not be better science produced on this topic, because funding agencies are not oriented toward finding out what constitutes a safe level of cigar smoking. From the available evidence I feel comfortable smoking cigars as a hobby but people smoking heavily, inhaling, or with a history of cigarette smoking should be very cautious.

Perfectly put!

[scinmyheart]

I listed my cigar smoking on my initial health application when I first started going to my current primary care physician five years ago, and he has never even commented on it...he knows I drink a ton becasue my triglycerides are always high as hell even though I take Zocor

with my pain management doctor, I always take him a cigar every month as he is of cuban decent and enjoys them

but I would ignore my doctor's comments on smoking, drinking and sex anyway

[ramon_cojones]

Nothing, my doctor smokes too