Re: Hookah Pipes and your health

General

Hookah Pipes and your health

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Anonymous 12-03-2006, 4:48 PM
If in fact the Hookah Pipes are bad and minimally less dangerous than Cigarettes, why is it that you can smoke hookah for 10 Years straight and walk away from it without having any symptoms of withdrawl in one day.  Why is it that the water that comes out of the flask when you clean it is brown yet the back of the filter of a cigarette has a dot rather than the entire thing being brown? Lastly, do this experiment get a cigarette inhale until you fill your mouth and blow through a tissue and see the color the tissue turns to, do the same with a hookah and notice the color of the tissue doesn't change signifying that the smoke is truly condensed of the harmful toxins that are entrapted in a cigar or cigarette smokers lung.  I think practical physical research should be done before we pass judgements based on opinion or personal preference.

Re: Hookah Pipes and your health

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Carl V. Phillips 12-04-2006, 7:07 PM
Dear poster,

There is a great deal of confusion about smoking tobacco in hookahs.  As with anything that is trendy, there is a lot of mythology about it, particularly stemming from the fact that the young people who have taken up the trend in North America want to disassociate themselves from the reputation associated with cigarettes.  Unfortunately, decades of (unintentional) experiments with different ways of inhaling tobacco smoke have shown that the differences among products, including filtering systems, do not make a huge difference in the health effects.  Moreover, it does not matter so much what is being burned, just that smoke is being inhaled.  (One of the myths about hookahs – which you do not mention – is that many people believe that hookah tobacco is somehow cleaner and more natural, and thus has substantially reduced health effects compared to tobacco processed for cigarettes; there is simply no reason to believe this is true.)

Lacking enough epidemiology on hookah smoking, forcing us to make the reasonable extrapolation from well-studied forms of smoking, and from the observation that innovations in filters have repeatedly not provided health improvements that they were originally expected to provide.  I think you may misunderstand the process of scientific inference (which has little to do with "personal preference" and is only "opinion" in the sense of "informed expert opinion"):  When presented with a new phenomenon (in this case, an exposure to a health hazard that has not been well studied), we look for something similar that we do know a lot about.  Since inhaling the smoke from burning tobacco is well-studied, we have a pretty good estimate of what doing so with a hookah will do to someone's body.  We would not want to assume that the effects are exactly the same, but since the exposure is almost the same, there is every reason to believe that the effects are almost the same.  

If we did not have such processes of scientific extrapolation available to us, we would be unable to draw conclusions about almost anything.  Fortunately, we do not have to say "this is not something we have specifically studied before, so we will assume it is harmless until proven otherwise" (which would be a terrible way to make health decisions), because we can make estimates based on what we do know.  Besides, even if the filtration system reduced the health risk from a given amount of smoke inhalation by 50% (better than we could realistically hope for), it would still be a substantial health hazard if used regularly.

Basically, inhaling smoke is bad.  It might be a bit better if the smoke is filtered, and filtering through water *might* have some health advantages over solid cigarette filters, but there is no reason to believe it does so enough to change the fundamental nature of the hazard.  I will note that I am not an expert on filtration, but can offer a bit of insight about your proposed experiment:  It has the advantage of being cheap and easy, but unfortunately cannot really tell us much about health effects.  What you can see in a filter does not necessarily reflect different health effects.  For example, you could darken an air filter with dirt dust, but such dust does not pose nearly the health hazard that combustion products -- visible and invisible -- do.  If the water is removing large particles, there is probably not a huge benefit.  If it is removing some of everything, then it is basically the same as just smoking less (which is better than smoking more, of course).  I will defer to any readers with expertise in filtration to tell us both more.  In any case, the filter trick is more of a "scare the children" type demonstration about the evils of smoking than it is an informative study.

However, it is quite possible that hookah smokers have some health advantages over the average cigarette smoker.  The total consumption is likely quite a lot lower, and less smoke is better than more smoke.  This is mostly because the total minutes per week spent smoking hookahs are likely fewer than those spent smoking cigarettes, given that hookah smoking is usually done in specialized venues rather than every time you step outside.  It is possible that this is aided by some of the smoke being captured by the water.  

It is also quite likely that social hookah smokers do not include the people who get the most benefit from nicotine (or, as you put it, it does not include the poeple who are unable to easily walk away from nicotine in one day), since such people are not likely to limit their nicotine consumption to their visits to hookah bars.  (This pattern might not hold in cultures where hookahs are more ubiquitous.)  This tends to remove North American hookah smokers from our main target population for tobacco harm reduction.  We are most interested in reaching people who are dedicated nicotine users and could benefit from a reduced-risk alternative to the cigarettes that they are not likely to just quit, rather than people who are occasional nicotine users who are willing and able to quit using it entirely (and probably will quit before too long).  However, even the latter would be better off seeking a way to get nicotine that did not involve inhaling smoke, for as long as they were going to be using nicotine.

–Carl V Phillips