Do Doctors Avoid City Smog More Than Others?

Fair or not, doctors serve as role models for public health. If your doctor chain-smoked, for instance, it would be a lot harder for him or her to convince you that cigarettes were harmful. Then again, it stands to reason that the chances of finding a doctor who lights a new cigarette with an old one should be quite low, since he or she presumably knows the dangers of the practice far better than the average person.

This last point is the basic idea behind a recent study of smog avoidance conducted by urban planners Eric Morris and Michael Smart of UCLA. Since doctors are experts in the field of health, and since urban pollution is bad for a person's health, Morris and Smart reasoned that doctors might take more precautions than the average person to distance themselves from its cloudy path.