I recently had an unfortunate week long hospital stay. Don’t ask. Naturally, I had a number of doctors in and out of my hospital room. I was a pack-and-a-half a day smoker for about 35 years. In 2011, I switched to “vaping”. So in the course of my hospital stay, I was asked if I smoked, and I explained that I had smoked for 35 years, and then switch to vaping. The reply from the doctor was, “same thing”.

This points up in sharp relief the ignorance of the doctor who made the statement. Vaping is in no way equivalent to smoking. Smoking dumps toxins in to the lungs multiple times a day. It triggers a number of reactions in the body, not the least of which is to jack up the activity of the adrenal glands, which are key in removing toxins from the system. In fact, a dirty secret of the modeling and acting professions is that when you first enter them, one of the advices you get is to start smoking, if you don’t already. Why? Smoking jacks up the activity of the adrenal glands, which jack up the metabolism. This keeps one’s weight down, something critically important for models, and likewise to a lesser degree for actors.

By contrast, vaping does not introduce toxins into the body. The vapor in e-cigarettes contains propylene glycol (a harmless food additive), vegetable glycerine (also a food additive), nicotine (not a toxin, per se, and certainly not a significant factor in influencing the adrenals), and a small amount of flavoring chemicals. Objectively, vaping has no comparison, in terms of toxicity to smoking. And I can attest, subjectively, that two are not even comparable. Smoke a cigarette after you’ve been away from it for a while, and you’ll immediately feel the toxin load on the body. It’s unmistakable.

And yet, here I have doctors claiming smoking and vaping are really the same thing, as far as the body is concerned. This is sheer ignorance. The problem is that, because doctors have several years of education more than most people, and extra initials after their names, people tend to automatically believe what they say. And doctors are arrogant enough to assume that whatever opinions they have about things, they are correct. They’re trained that way.

And this is precisely why I automatically distrust doctors. They are capable of spewing all manner of garbage and having you believe it, simply because they’re doctors. I’m naturally inclined to disbelieve anything that sounds wrong to me. If you’re going to make a statement, supposedly of fact, you’d better be prepared to provide some reasonable backup of the statement. Otherwise, I’m going to ignore whatever you say.