My list have been built in a few minutes and is not analytic, my toxicology teacher back at the university used to have a better one. He presented it alphabetically ordered, at the beginning of his course, asking for students to put it in proper risk magnitude. I was said that he made this test every year and he concluded that people were quite confused by ignorance and fears misjudging the real impact of many of the factors involved.PeterHB wrote:It is quite a good list of environmental factors people need to take a view on, though I do think you should have included smoking.
My point is: since lead is not transmitted through the skin, yunzi stones are... not in the list (and yes, very very far from smoking, that is indeed a big risk for health).
Avoiding self perceived risk is a matter of personal choice that have not to be justified. Defending it with strange theories (not based on any quantitative analysis) is not a good thing.
I will put two more (sad) examples to try sharing my thoughts about this matter.
What will you say to someone making a discrimination about HIV-positive people?
Maybe deciding that they do not want to sit in the same room because they are being exposed to increased risk of AIDS and not wanting to hear/discuss any scientific/medical evidence about "no real risk" according to wrong deduction as "the virus is present, so the risk is higher".
Anti-vaxxers are stating similar theories to support their position, that in the end is putting at real risk people that cannot be vaccinated (e.g. newborn babies).
Again, sorry for being too direct and for proposing examples that may sound offensive.
It is very clear to me that avoid buying/using yunzi stones is a matter of personal choice that do not negatively affect other people like in both of mine examples.
Nevertheless, I do not like when this kind of personal choice is cloaked with (fallacious) logic.
I wish you all the best,
Galation