The Surgeon General is Dangerous to your Health…
Cyberchondria
When I first started gathering research on smoking and smoking bans I created a file category titled SGDH đ the Surgeon General is Dangerous to your Health.
One of the aspects of that danger comes from smokers avoiding doctors because they’re tired of being “judged” for what the choice they make and they’re tired of being preached at with information that they’ve obviously heard hundreds of times unless they’ve been living in a cave at the bottom of the Marianas Trench for the last 50 years.
But there’s a flip side to this as well:? Nonsmokers who become so obsessed with their health choices and conditions that they spend their lives worrying about dying instead of simply enjoying life while they have it.
If they’ve got good insurance they’ll run to the doctor constantly with worries about every little tweak of pain in the interstitial areas of their rib cages, every new and potentially malignant freckle that they don’t remember having seen a hundred times before, and for a prophylactic examination if they’ve had the terrible misfortune of being within a hundred feet of someone who might have been thinking about smoking.
In TobakkoNacht I examined one of these “worried well” type folks: a sad woman who’d been so brainwashed by the Antis that she was convinced she’d gotten breast cancer from using a phone that a smoking co-worker sometimes used.
She went so far in this obsession that she talked her doctor into giving her a biopsy of some bump she thought she felt in her breast and is now wiping down the phone with chemicals before using it. Seriously.? Here’s the posting she made to a health area online — and it was not in any context where it would have made sense as a satire: she was dead serious:
“I’m a true believer in third-hand smoke, and I’m not even a child. At work I had to share a telephone with a smoker. I developed breathing problems, had a swelling in my mouth, and also had a âsuspiciousâ breast biopsy. I started cleaning the phone off with âWet Onesâ wipes.
My swelling went away, plus my breathing problems went away. Still have to be tested again to see if my biopsy is benign, but I’m pretty optimistic.”
With that in mind, see the story below from the UK’s Telegraph about the “Worried Well” and think of the part the antismoking campaign has played in creating this suffering.
Originally written By:Â Michael J. McFadden
Author of “TobakkoNacht — The Antismoking Endgame
