The man who stopped smoking
is the title of a video from the British Medical Journal (BMJ). The blurb says:
Richard Doll was a luminary of clinical research whose case control study, published in the BMJ in 1950, first identified smoking as an important cause of cancer and other diseases. The paper's findings were received with apathy, anger and disbelief. This 10 minute film to promote the BMJ archive now being fully searchable back to 1840 charts Doll's remarkable life and the impact of both of this paper, and his follow-up British Doctors' Study.
Crazy, but they were sane while enjoying the smoke as seen in the video. Funny, but having this kind of disease is serious. The "man who stopped smoking" still have enough time to restore his health, so he had the chance to talk to people at the age of 85. For the "the man who didn't stop smoking yet" based in the study of Peto et al. entitled "Smoking, smoking cessation, and lung cancer in the UK since 1950: combination of national statistics with two case-control studies" the cumulative risk of getting lung cancer by age 75 is 10% for those who stopped at age 60; 6%, at age 50; 3%, at age 40; and 2%, at the age of 30. As I've checked, the average life expectancy in the Philippines in the year 2005 for male is 68.9 years and 73.3 years for female. Hooray!!!
To cut it short, life is short. We are the author of our own life story and the one who is responsible for the outcome. As a radiation oncology physicist, I am just a reader of the pain of most lung CA patient where I usually prefer not to leave any comment. I cannot stand to be scientific for them to say "face the music" nor I cannot act like as if I'm layman in oncology and say "don't worry, you will live longer" when I know it's palliative.