I hate it so much and every time I go out I try and avoid anyone smoking in front of
me or passing by me. Passively inhaling someone’s smoke makes my lungs writhe
in disgust. At my time at university my lectures were in between two buildings,
in the ground between the two building other students use it as a smoking place
where at least 100 people are smoking at the same time (I might be over exaggerating
with that number a little bit). Every time I used to pass through, I would hold
my breath so I wouldn't inhale the toxic smoke.
Smoking is detrimental to your health and so is passive smoking. By passive
smoking, you also inhale all the toxic smoke even if you are not a smoker and
it can have negative effects on you too.
With so
many anti-smoking campaigns everywhere it is a surprise to me that there are
still people smoking; from “Stoptober” to anti-smoking billboards to anti-smoking
images on the packages of cigarettes, cigarette filters, papers and tobacco,
there is also help in your local pharmacy where they provide you with
information and stop-smoking kits which help you stop the bad habit. I think
just the images of blackened lungs and bloody tar in a cigarette, which is
printed on adverts and even on the front of cigarette and tobacco packets, is
enough to scare someone from smoking.
Why should you
quit?
It is
never too late to give up smoking. The risk to your heart health significantly decreases,
soon after you stop. Tar, along with carbon
monoxide, nicotine and heavy metals such as arsenic and lead all affect the
body in negative ways.
Carbon
monoxide (CO): CO on its own is a silent killer; it has no smell and cannot be
seen. CO in cigarettes, when inhaled, binds to our red blood cells instead of
oxygen, making it even more difficult to deliver oxygen around the body.
Nicotine:
nicotine stimulates your body to produce adrenaline, which can make your heart
beat faster and harder and raises your blood pressure, making the heart work
harder than it should be working.
Tar: tar
in cigarettes sticks to the linking of the lungs and damages the lining of your
arteries, causing a build up of fatty material (atheroma), therefore narrowing
the artery leading to possible, angina, heart attack or stroke and the blood is
more susceptible to clotting.
On top
of all the cardiovascular disease risks, there is also risk of cancer. Smokers
are especially prone to lung, mouth and throat cancers and have a higher risk
than non-smokers.
What if I really
want to stop smoking but I can’t because I’m addicted?
Researchers
have been trying to find a way to combat addiction to drugs, such as nicotine,
morphine, codeine and cocaine. They are currently trying to produce vaccination
against nicotine, which makes the body produce antibodies against nicotine so
that the body can get rid of nicotine, in a similar pathway to how it gets rid
of a cold. This way the body produces an immune response to nicotine so it is
excreted from the body and it doesn’t reach the brain- where the addiction
lies. This research was published in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, where
they have seen other researchers study this technique also, but reaching
failure at the phase III trials. We hope that in the very near future the
nicotine vaccination technique will prove to be successful and work for
everyone, because it will not only be able to treat nicotine addiction, but
also other addictions to other drugs.
Hypnosis and
Cognitive Behaviour Therapy for Smoking
The first
time I heard of this technique was a couple of days ago. Hypnosis therapy for
smoking cessation is becoming increasingly popular between smokers however how
it works and why it works is relatively unclear. The idea behind this type of treatment
is to manipulate the patients’ cognitive behaviour to allow them to abstain from
smoking as much as possible. In a study
conducted by Dickson-Spillmann et al,
they have shown that even after one hypnosis session, the withdrawal effects
that smokers get after they stop smoking were reduced; however if hypnosis is conducted without
cognitive therapy it does not have an effect on smoking abstinence in smokers. This is one of the few studies of this type
and more studies will be conducted in the future to compare different smoking-abstinence
encouraging therapies.
Smoking shisha
isn’t as harmful as smoking cigarettes…
Another
trend that has been spreading in between young adults is shisha smoking (also
called hookah, argileh, nargileh). Since this smoke has been flavoured with an
array of fruity aromas, it attracts smokers for its attractive smell and taste in
conjunction with rumours that claim that shisha isn’t as harmful as smoking
because apparently the water in the pipe absorbs all the nicotine so it’s not
as addictive and won’t harm the shisha smoker. And the bigger problem is, is
that it is easily available to those under the legal smoking age.
Shisha
café owners want their customers to believe that shisha has an “efficient”
water filter which prevents the toxins in the shisha tobacco to not reach the
smoker, when in reality the water only partially absorbs the nicotine and
shisha smokers still inhale the nicotine and are exposed to its negative
effects. Scientific research proves that if a shisha session lasts for about 1
hour, the smoke released from it, is as if you are smoking 100 cigarettes.
Other than nicotine, shisha does have harmful toxins in it. Like
cigarettes it contains carbon monoxide, nicotine, tar and heavy metals such as
arsenic and lead, reducing your body’s ability to carry oxygen around in your
blood.
Finally…
Remember,
it’s never too late to stop smoking and it will literally be the best decision you’ve
made in your life. Even though there is still more to discuss I will end this
post here because it is getting really long.
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