The BMA advertises its incompetence to the world

Doctors are routinely shown to be woefully ignorant about nicotine. Their union is content that they remain that way.

Research consistently shows that Doctors are badly misinformed about nicotine and vaping. Is it any wonder when they are led by a union that sees no problem with it?

Media is alive this week with the bullshit opinions of the UK doctors’ union, the British Medical Association, about vaping.

When vaping went mainstream over a decade ago, and it was no longer possible to ignore the significant benefits of the products for improving public health, one by one British health charities and NGOs fell into line in recognising the benefits of devices which were proving to divert millions from the harms of combustible tobacco use. The very last institution to do so was the British Medical Association.

It would seem it has never been an easy fit for the ideological anti-industry blowhards at the BMA, though, as they have just released a 19 page report clinging to every anti-vaping myth they could cram into one document.

Of course, the UK’s brainless media - thirsty as they are for scandalising clickbait content - have fallen for it hook, line, and sinker.

“There is a growing epidemic of vape use in the UK” the BMA’s report breathlessly announces, “which needs to urgently be addressed (sic) through tighter regulations of products and restrictions to access.”

Loosely basing its ill-informed opposition to vaping and other reduced products on vagaries about adolescent use, the BMA proposes comprehensive and visceral controls on the design and marketing of products which even it admits are proven to be life-saving according to more respectable public health institutions. It seems to have completely overlooked the fact that deterring use of the products for youths will also deter up to twenty times more adult users who are far more likely to have a history of long-term smoking which would benefit from switching to safer alternatives.

The BMA is not asking for much, except a ban of all disposable vapes, a ban all non-tobacco vape flavours, all imagery, colouring and branding for both the packaging and vape device, restrictions on all advertising and marketing and, just while they are on a roll, plain packaging of nicotine pouches. The well understood failures of every prohibition ever attempted in the history of mankind seems to have completely passed them by.

In its pursuit of invoking the full suite of anti-vaping activist red herrings, the BMA has certainly done its research. According to its paper, the “sudden rise” in the past year or two of vaping products is illustrated by “Juul, one of the first popular brands of vape, launched an advertising campaign in 2015 that featured bright colours and cast young, fashionable models as well as purchasing ad banners on child friendly websites.”

Erm, their own citation was 9 years ago and took place in another country which is separated from the UK by a big thing called the Atlantic Ocean. Juul adverts in the UK exclusively featured long-smoking mature adults, but I guess the truth didn’t suit the BMA’s fact-free crusade.

Doctors in the UK, the BMA’s members, have routinely been shown to be incredibly ignorant about nicotine use.

In 2021, research by Public Health England found that “the greatest obstacle we face is the widespread misconception amongst smokers and health professionals that most of the harm of smoking comes from the nicotine. While nicotine is the addictive substance in cigarettes, it is relatively harmless.”

In 2023, the ignorance of doctors on this subject was further exposed in a survey of 1,191 UK practitioners. It found that 44% of doctors believe that just going cold turkey is the most effective method with just 9% currently believing that vaping is the most effective route. This, despite the fact that evidence shows that vaping is by far the most popular and effective method of quitting smoking in the UK.

That survey also concluded that 77% wrongly think that nicotine is the component in smoke that causes tobacco related illness and death (it doesn’t) and that 53% said they weren’t aware of any training opportunities. 58% also said they’d never been offered any training opportunity. Hey, if only there was a doctors’ union which could rectify that information deficit.

The woeful ignorance of doctors towards reduced risk products is so shameful that it elicited an exasperated plea last year from real experts in East Anglia, York, and Wales who asked “Do respiratory physicians not care about people who smoke?”

Describing emotional objections to safer alternatives, such as those of the BMA, to combustible cigarettes as “quite frankly, nonsense”, the researchers asked the question, “[d]espite 15 years of population experience with no substantial evidence of harm, does concern about youth vaping, together within harm misperceptions, really stand scrutiny compared with the risks of smoking?”

If the BMA wasn’t so tied up with its own ideological self-importance, maybe it could have implemented a training regime to properly inform its membership and save them from the ridicule of being perennial simpletons on the subject.

Sadly, this would be contrary to the BMA’s incentives. It is important to understand that public health is not the BMA’s focus. Its income is by way of union subscriptions. If GPs are badly educated, it is not in the BMA’s interests to correct that and school them.

It matters not to the BMA whether UK Doctors are well-informed about vaping or not, only that it represents the opinions, stupid and ill-informed as they may be, of its membership.

Insead of grandstanding on TV, offering its laughably dimwitted understanding of the science and regulation of vaping in the UK, perhaps the doctors’ union would better serve its membership - and public health in the UK - by working towards making Doctors look less of an ignorant laughing stock about nicotine.