I’m not doctor, not in the least bit, but on your comment against Informed, just because it “improves” cognitive thinking doesn’t mean it’d cure any sort of disease or disorder.
Not all mental illnesses affect your brain in a way that it affects your ability to think cognitively. Plus, your brain is an amazing organ and uses different parts to effect how you work.
The nicotine may affect one area, but a disease or disorder may attack multiple making the nicotine have little to no effect.
Plus, if you think about the severity of certain mental illnesses, you’d have to have a very high level of nicotine to have any effect.

I may not have direct facts on this, but this is just was common sense says to me.

INFORMED said that nicotene improves cognitive thinking????? What???? If so why aren’t they useing nicotene on mentally challanged people. I think informed is actually misinformed……… Never heard of that!

I’ve been in the radiation business for a long time. I work at Los Alamos National Labs and came across this blog trying to find some organic tobacco to use in a research project on radiation and tobacco (not that anyone will believe me, but I don’t smoke). Here’s the problem. The radioactivity in cigarettes does, in fact, come from the tobacco itself and consequently, the nicotine. Polonium 210, an alpha emitter, is absorbed by the roots and sticks to the leaves. Tobacco leaves have a “sticky” quality that attracts Polonium. Polonium is found naturally in small quanities in the dirt, and is present in foods, but it is also found in ferilizer.

Now, in most foods where you find Polonium, the Polonium just goes through your digestive tract, it doesn’t do much damage, and you also urinate it out. (Smokers have more Polonium in their urine than non smokers about 10 times over) But when you inhale it, it goes to your lungs, and it happens to be attracted to the places where your lungs branch. But there is no way for the alpha particle to leave your body like there is in the digestive tract. Thus goes “informed”’s tomato arguement.

There are three types of radiation: alpha, gamma, and neutron. Gammas are the stuff that comes out of the sun - you know you have small bout of radiation poisoning when you are in the sun too long, we call it a sunburn. Gammas go right through the body. Gamma radiation is also found in cigarettes, but they go right through the body and not much happens. Alphas are these huge particles (on a molecular scale at least) that are usually repelled by dead skin.

So when you smoke tobacco, you have all this Polonium beating around your lungs giving off radiation with no escape. Sure, the organic stuff has less of it, but it’s there. And it’s there no matter what you smoke. And it can stick around for a while and cause a lot of lasting damage. Thus goes “informed”’s arguement about people getting cancers after they quit smoking.

Now, “informed” (and I use that moniker lightly) might point out that there had never, since 1964, been conclusive evidence to “prove” that it’s the Polonium that causes health problems. This is true, but mostly because of the lack of study design. We are not allowed to take measurements of lungs from people who have never smoked and tell them to start smoking (something about ethics…) nor have we figured out how to get lab rats to smoke, and it’s the mechanism of actually smoking that we need to look at to make the determination. Someone tried to get lab chimps to smoke, but it didn’t work out for some reason.

And “informed” reasons that because people have been doing it for centuries, and that is simply false. People have done a lot of things for years and it turned out to be harmful. The Romans put lead in their wine to bring out the taste. Oops. People leached for almost a thousand years when they were sick, and people died from blood loss. Women died from sepsis in childbirth because people assisting them didn’t wash their hands.

“Informed” - just because you have a fact or two doesn’t mean that you have an argument of value. Facts have to be intpreted as a whole, not just out of context, which is clearly what you are doing to justify your smoking habits.

Just say you like to smoke and leave the science to the scientists.

And yes, I did used to smoke myself, so don’t get all “you don’t know what you are talking about”. I learned all the facts, and decided it just wasn’t worth the risk - organic or not.

an important misunderstanding here is carcinogens. these are not something that happen when we do bad things, they happen almost any time we do anything. cooking using any type of heating element will produce a carcinogenic effect, this is actually most common when cooking vegetables, as the tar in cigarettes is a natural product of plants, and is found in every plant we eat.

the studies regarding linking cancer to various things have been long and often times puzzling; following studies on cigarette links to cancers have been at times perplexing and frustrating. what we have discovered is that cancers associated to smoking occur in a randomized fashion, with the major trademark being a genetic (i.e. hereditary) requirement to be prone. there are documented genetics in some families that actually give them an immunity to very specific forms of cancer.

we can certainly link cancer to carcinogens… but this is not helpful. great examples of recent study results: increased risk of stomach cancer from using any form of charbroil, deep frying, or open flame cooking. increased risk of oral cancer from toasted breads. increased risk from sauted vegetables. increased risk from use of wood burning stoves and fireplaces, gas flamed furnaces and water heaters.. etc.

people often reference an old chart, that charts the specific increase of cigarette tobacco use in america and the rise of cancer. what they rarely explain is that cancer rates (in cancers related to smoking) have been dropping faster then the rate of people quitting.

what the chart doesnt tell you is tobacco smoking is centuries older then the chart documents, it is an ancient past time of the native americans, india, and the middle east. it has bene practiced in europe for at least three centuries. what the chart actually charts, is the impact of industrial pollutants (industrial revolution) on cancer rates.

remember the ionic breeze ‘air purifier’? all those ionic toys? yeah, they arent too popular anymore after they were linked to autoimmune disorders of the lungs, specifically causing asthma, increased bronchitis infections, etc.

the most recent cigarette focused tobacco & cancer study found a new result: of cases that can be casually (not causative, there is not 1 case of officially recognized cancer from cigarette smoking *only*, world wide.) linked to tobacco, 60% of them were in people who quit smoking before they developed cancer.

nicotine has, additionally, nothing to do with cancer, and is infact as a natural additive, safer for humans than caffiene. don’t believe me? ask a botanist about all the other plants you eat with nicotine in them, most noteably, tomatos.

and yes, the email address is real