Give ‘second, reduce harm’ a chance in post-pandemic era

The smoking epidemic remains a major and intractable global problem.

THE ancient Greek physician Hippocrates, in his book Of the Epidemics, famously says “primum non nocere”, or “first, do no harm”. This call has become one of the key mantras of modern medicine.

However, views have been expressed that this idea is impractical and not even possible. So perhaps, in the context of contemporary public health, what may be a more pragmatic complementary idea to Hippocrates’ original call is a “second, reduce harm” idea. This has led to the development of the concept of “harm reduction”; I will use some examples to illustrate the argument for this idea.