failure rates

Twenty percent of American adults still smoke. And according to the American Cancer Society, one thousand under-18 smokers start the habit daily.

On top of that, each year 43% of the adult smokers try and quit--but failure rates stand at 70-80%.

The HISTalk site, a vendor-supported health IT "gossip" site, has a lower standard for its reader comments than more responsible healthcare blogs and websites such as HCRenewal, allowing anonymous ad hominem and other forms of hysterical or irrational argumentation to be posted without refutation.

In a way, this is good, because such posts may reveal sentiments held by a number of people but rarely expressed, except in an anonymous forum.