Also @joneyry09 I don't want you to think I'm just some quack that spouts off how all doctors are wrong and cigars are good. Let me clarify. I looked up that study. It was conducted by Dr. George Cierny III a doctor that apparently specialized in osteomyelitis, infections of the bone. The researchers studied only 29 people, all of which had broken tibias AND developed osteomyelitis. The bone growth was assessed after the infected bone was removed from the patients, and that is where he determined that his patients who were admitted smokers healed 38% slower than the non-smokers.
But here's the thing you have to watch out for with these kind of observational studies. What was going on that they didn't observe or mention. For one, very few people develop osteomyelitis after a bone fracture, I'm not sure the percentage of people but it's likely very high that those that do are already in bad health or have some other risk factors at play. Next we have to understand is that regular cigarette smokers are generally people that don't exactly obey the general healthy medical advice. So what other risk factors did they have going on in their lives that predisposed them for osteomyelitis after a bone fracture? Could those who were smokers also have been mostly obese and the non-smokers of a healthy weight - we don't know, they omitted that information. How many of these in the smoker side were diabetic or had some other medical condition at play? What was the difference between those and the non-smoker group. What I'm saying is, is that there is a lot of information at play that wasn't considered because a researcher decided he wanted to write an article and needed to make a point.
Those who have cited the paper have blamed the nicotine, but here's the thing, what about the other hundreds of chemicals that are included in cigarettes that are ingested when smoked? Did Dr. Cierny consider or exclude those? Nope. What we have here is an observational study from a researcher that simply chooses to demonize nicotine. Also, that small of a sample size means virtually nothing. Especially considering we don't know how many were men or women, young, middle aged or elderly. There was no follow up to that study. For all we know the smoking group could have all been admitted to the hospital for the duration of their treatment and the food provided them was not conducive to good healing while the non-smokers may have been younger and healthier and recovered at home eating proper foods.
Dr. Cierny took an incredible leap of faith and nobody questioned it because everyone can just assume that nicotine is bad. Heck, that's been made so clear that people are afraid to even try to study the difference between cigarette, cigar and spit tobacco users. If researchers even try to argue that nicotine on its own may not be entirely bad, they're ostracized. It's the same in the nutrition world, but that's another story.
My point is, your doctor doesn't know what he's talking about. It looks like he gets on pubmed once a week, reads the abstract for a few studies so that he feels comfortably up to date and then spouts it off to his patients like he's an expert on the subject. When in fact most general practitioners and even most treating specialists are just too busy with the day to day that they even have a clue what the research is saying or even if the trend of knowledge is shifting.
So go on, open that humidor, light a nice stick and eat yourself a ribeye tonight!
But yeah, grain of salt - especially when you know someone out there has an agenda on the topic.
