Merchants of Doubt: Stress, heart disease, and your friendly tobacco company

NPR today: The Secret History Behind The Science Of Stress

Quote:

Type A personality is to a large extent a construct of the tobacco industry - Mark Petticrew

A win win, throw people off the trail of the connection between heart disease and tobacco, and sell cigarettes as a means of reducing stress.





Here's something older, it isn't a new revelation that the tobacco companies have been selling scientific doubt for decades.



Tobacco Industry Efforts Undermining Evidence Linking Secondhand Smoke With Cardiovascular Disease



What's interesting is in a review of the research connecting stress to heart disease it's hard to find any with positive results that were not funded by tobacco companies.

Quote:

... as more studies have piled up the original findings of Friedman and Rosenman have been undermined. "There have been very few studies which have actually shown that Type A behavior is a risk factor for illness and heart disease," Petticrew says. "Of the studies that do show that, and there are only four, in three of them the researchers had some contact or money from the tobacco industry.

Perhaps stress, the type A personality and heart disease will go the way of tonsillectomies for strep throat and antacids for stomach ulcers. Wonder what other bad medicine might need to be weeded out of the archives?

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