F.M. Martin

Health Hazards of Cigarette Smoking: Current Popular Beliefs

If any serious attempt is to be made to bring about a voluntary reduction in cigarette consumption, it is of some importance to have reasonably reliable in formation on the extent to which the risks of smoking are recognized by members of the general public. This paper, based upon sample inter view surveys carried out in Edinburgh, describes the nature of current attitudes and beliefs on this subject and attempts to trace the pattern of their distribu tion in the community. The information was collected in the course of an inquiry into the effectiveness of a health education campaign concerned with the dangers of cigarette smoking. This campaign, which was organized by the Edinburgh City Corporation, began early in 1959 and its first phase had been completed by April. The research inquiry was made up of two parallel surveys, carried out respectively before (November v 1958) and after (May, 1959) the cam paign, so that a comparison of the two sets of results would give some indication of the extent to which habits and beliefs had been modified during the course of the campaign. Certain questions were asked only in the first survey and some only in the post-campaign interviews, but most were asked on both occasions. In the tables which follow, we shall therefore be dealing sometimes with the results of one or the other survey, and sometimes with a combination of the two; but the findings of the two

Some Popular Beliefs Concerning the Causes of Cancer

from the critical question of whether it is morally defensible, there are essentially practical reasons. To-day, when people have reached an unprecedented level of literacy and education, and have an almost unlimited access to a wide variety of sources of information about health and disease, this whole objection loses force. Whether we like it or not, patients are going to have their questions answered with varying degrees of accuracy by friends and relatives, by quacks of all kinds, by articles in newspapers and popular magazines, and by commercial advertisements. It is therefore clearly in the interest both of the physician and of his patient that the latter should not leave his doctor with questions he would like to have asked but did not, or with answers that did not satisfy him. It seems an elementary insistence that the patient is entitled to know all his doctor can tell him and that his doctor is the best person to tell him.