A limited study showed that some smokers believe that e-cigarettes help in quitting smoking, while others believe that they represent a temptation for those who have already painstakingly given up this habit.
Researchers from Scotland wrote in the journal Tobacco Control that they interviewed 64 smokers and found little consensus on the benefits and harms of e-cigarettes, which reflects a division in the medical community over the validity of promoting e-cigarettes as a safe alternative to traditional cigarettes.
“We are starting to know about the health risks because e-cigarettes are a relatively new product,” Amanda Amos, who led the study and is a researcher at the Center for Population Health Research at the University of Edinburgh, said in an email.
E-cigarettes are designed to mimic real cigarettes, with the addition of an attractive element: the thick vapor smoke they emit. It contains a battery and a heating element, as well as a container containing nicotine and other liquids or flavorings.
Because what makes cigarettes harmful is tobacco smoke, electronic cigarettes can be safer because they do not burn tobacco. However, the nicotine inside it causes addiction.
Amos and her colleagues interviewed 11 individuals and 12 groups of current smokers and those who had quit within a year.
The majority of participants considered smoking a type of addiction, and they believed that willpower plays a pivotal role in quitting smoking. Most of them had tried electronic cigarettes at least once.
They consider electronic cigarettes to be completely different from nicotine replacement products such as gum and patches that are supposed to help smokers quit. Because doctors recommend using these nicotine replacements for those trying to quit, they consider them medical products.
But with electronic cigarettes, people were not clear about their purpose or the correct way to use them, and they did not directly link them to quitting compared to medicinal gum or patches.
Some believe that electronic cigarettes are a more satisfactory alternative to smoking, but others do not adopt this point of view, but rather see them as a danger to those trying to quit smoking or those who have already quit.
Dr. Riccardo Polosa, professor of internal medicine at the University of Catania in Italy, says, “This research shows that public opinion about electronic cigarettes is far from crystallized, with a lot of confusion surrounding the product and its intended use.”
“It’s really not complicated at all,” Polosa, who was not involved in the study, said in an email. “E-cigarettes are a safer alternative to smoking and are specifically designed for smokers who are unable to quit using other methods.”
Dr. Konstantinos Farsalinos, a researcher at the Onassis Center for Cardiac Surgery, says that although the study is limited and cannot draw a general concept about smoking from it, it highlights a widespread lack of clarity among consumers in many countries.
“The bottom line is that smokers are not encouraged to use e-cigarettes as an alternative to smoking,” he said in an email. “But for smokers who cannot or do not want to switch to medical alternatives, e-cigarettes can truly be a lifesaver.”
