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British Doctors (Finally) Support E-cigarettes

Common sense is better late than never! The Royal College of Physicians (RCP) says that smokers should be encouraged to use e-cigarettes to help them quit.

British doctors finally support e-cigarettes doctor showing thumb up on a United Kingdom flag on background

After reviewing all of the evidence, the Royal College of Physicians has announced that vaping is much safer than smoking and could improve the lives of millions of people. This brings them in line with other leading tobacco experts such as Public Health England, the British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK and Action on Smoking and Health who all agree that vaping has a role to play in reducing deaths from smoking-related diseases.

E-cigarettes can prevent and reduce Smoking-related Deaths and Diseases

Professor John Bitton, who co-authored the RCP report, argues that “e-cigarettes have very little downside and a lot of potential benefit.” His sentiments are echoed by the Department of Health, who say that “over a million people have completely replaced smoking with e-cigarettes and that the evidence suggests they are substantially less harmful than cigarettes.”

E-cigarettes are not a gateway to smoking

The report stresses the fact that vaping is not a gateway to smoking. The “gateway theory” — the idea that vapers will get a taste for nicotine then move onto smoking — is completely unfounded, but that hasn’t stopped it from being splashed across newspaper headlines. The RCP report emphasises the fact that the gateway theory is “unfounded” and unsupported by the evidence. It also stresses that smoking is not being re-normalised by vaping either, in fact smoking rates are at all-time lows in countries with widespread access to e-cigarettes. Think about it… we don’t worry that a child who uses an iPad will progress onto an old Sega Megadrive, so why would a vaper actually go backwards and try a less sophisticated product?

E-cigarettes are being used by smokers to help them quit smoking

Vaping is the most popular method of quitting smoking that tobacco users have access to. E-cigarettes recently outstripped nicotine gums and patches as a quitting tool. The RCP report argues that e-cigarette users, when supported by a doctor, are more likely to quit smoking permanently. Current stop smoking services spend around £500 for each successful quit smoking attempt. E-cigarettes, on the other hand, have helped over a million people quit smoking in this country, at no additional cost to the taxpayer, so it’s no wonder that many are calling for e-cigarettes to be made available on the NHS. Sadly, though a number of well-respected British medical institutions have woken up to the life-saving potential of vaping, it comes too late to affect the TPD — a piece of EU-legislation which will seriously undermine the e-cigarette industry. As more and more medical professionals evaluate the evidence and realise the benefits of vaping, it becomes increasingly obvious that the anti-vaping lobby are a disastrous mix of the uneducated and the untrustworthy.

Will this announcement from the Royal College of Physicians lead to more people taking up vaping?

By Lenny