The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
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I see med students smoking regularly off campus grounds, and if there is ever any remonstration from the hospital it takes the form of photographs of unsightly cigarette butts thrown in the sidewalk--a problem because it upsets the neighborhood nearby, presumably, for social harmony is the real moral law here. Appearances, face, tatemae.
I never get it when I see doctors smoking. I feel the same quasi-revulsion as when I read about married pastors fucking their parishioners, cops stealing, or college administrators privileging star athletes and sports over academic programs. The little glimpses of entropy and chaos. Yes, I'm a naive idealist.
That said, it was a nice read. We all contain multitudes.
I used to be extremely militant about not smoking and avoiding those who did, but I softened up my stance when I realized that with advances in modern medicine, a fresh smoker is unlikely to die of lung cancer. I hold this to be true even leaving aside AGI timelines, cancer treatments are improving and fast. Still not the best idea, because they make you feel like shit when you're not smoking them, leaving aside other health issues, but I don't go about handing out pamphlets.
As for vapes, me and my girl did a literature review prior to our first purchase, and the evidence demonstrating any health risks is thin to outright nonexistent, I'd say they have like <1% the risk or harm of cigarettes, if you care to quantify. At that point I don't really lose sleep over it.
I suppose I have fewer hopes in modern medicine than you, particularly as regards the health risks of smoking (or vaping). You may or may not be right about the prospects of lung cancer for any given smoker, but obviously routine smoking is a predictor of all manner of other cancers, as well as COPD and various other non-respiratory ailments.
I am not telling you anything you do not already know.
I would probably still smoke when drinking, as I did for years, just for the social aspect, but I seem to have developed what is probably chronic bronchitis (though I have not been diagnosed) and the last time I had a cigarette with a smoker friend of mine I was coughing for days afterward. Not fun.
Don't take this as my being preachy, though it's true I tend toward being that gadfly presence in people's lives. As I suggested earlier, we all have our faults, and I certainly have mine--nagging being one of them. Doctors in Japan are notorious for actively avoiding telling people to stop smoking or drinking, or even suggesting this as a possibility, though they will regularly shake their heads at eating so-called "western food." Once a doctor's prescribed remedy for my son's digestive issues was: "Eat Japanese food" (和食を食べなさい). The vagueness of this was not surprising, but it still ground my gears.
We're on the same page here, I didn't take you coming across as preachy, I just wanted to clarify why I felt I could vape without worrying about it coming back to bite me. While hypocrisy isn't the worst sin, I avoid it when I can!
Given the lifestyles of Japanese salarymen, I suspect half of them would either die or kill themselves if you take away their few remaining pleasures in life haha
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