>Hi Tamar,
>
>>>There's a lot of this faux science going around. Second-hand smoke, for example. Most state's smoking bans and a good number of federal laws are based upon the assumption that seciond-hand smoke is hideously bad for you. Now, logic and common sense would dictate that second-hand smoke IS bad for you, or as George Carlin put it, you wouldn't want to eat a second-hand ham sandwich. Having said that, there are no thorough scientific studies on just how bad it is. So all these laws are built on assumptions without hard fact.
>>
>>You said "no thorough scientific studies on just how bad it is," so you acknowledge that, in fact, there are studies that conclude second-hand smoke it bad for you. (It wasn't hard for me to find them.)
>>
>>Typically, studies aren't "thorough" in the sense you mean it. No one study is going to measure all the different risks from second-hand smoke. Typically, a study will measure one thing, another study will measure something, and so on. Eventually, epidemiologists take all those studies and crunch the numbers to get a bigger picture.
>
>Yes, that's exactly what I mean. There are studies but not definitive and thorough.

But that's the way science is done. A little piece at a time, gradually building evidence. The nature of research is that it's much easier to measure one variable at a time.

However, read Super Crunchers. It explains how all this data can now be combined to provide larger scale results.

Tamar