Smoking and Health Isses

I’m going to start this column with a disclaimer: I do not advocate, nor do I encourage smoking. I know from personal experience that it is easy to become addicted and difficult to break the addiction. Probably the reason for that is that it is both habit and addiction. You have to break both the addiction to nicotine and the habit of oral stimulus to succeed.

Further, I have no conclusive proof for what I believe to be true of smoking. Maybe the federal government should use some of those boondoggle grants to fund a study on the topic. Lord knows, they fund enough other goofy studies.

Okay, enough on that… Here is the “Kline Theory on the Cessation of Smoking and the Onset of health Issues.”

Those of us who have smoked cigarettes for any length of time and in any quantity of a-pack-a-day or more, and have subsequently quit smoking, have developed health problems within a year or so of quitting. I find that disturbing, and I attribute it to immune system breakdown that follows the cessation. (Examples to follow) Therefore, I postulate that there is a correlation between the two, and that either:
1. Nicotine addiction stimulates the immune system, or
2. Nicotine withdrawal suppresses the immune system.
Either way, it is almost a sure thing that a person who smoked and then quits will suffer some debilitating health problems shortly thereafter. These range from arthritis to cardio-vascular disease, to—the reason you quit in the first place—cancer. There may be others, but those are the ones I know about.

I quit smoking due to an eight-week seminar held by SmokeEnders, an entity that might no longer exist. That was on March 6, 1980. In September of 1980 I suffered chest pains and was hospitalized and catheterized. The diagnosis was coronary artery disease. I have had a coronary artery bypass, six angioplasties and two stents, a ICD/pacemaker implant and a coronary ablation in the thirty years since that event.

It would take too much space and open too many old wounds to detail the rest of the cases of people I know, or knew, who quit smoking only to be plagued by health issues a short time later. However, there are over a dozen instances I can think of where the two were directly related. Some have resulted in continued disability, while others were fatal.

The key factor in my theorizing about the causal effect of quitting smoking and the onset of disease is that I cannot think of a single case where a smoker I know gave up the habit and didn’t develop some health issues. You might conjecture that maybe they got that way due to age alone, but even younger quitters seem to have the syndrome, if I can call it a syndrome.

Think about the people you know who also have been smokers and quit, only to get sick soon afterwards of an apparently unrelated cause. It isn’t always cancer that is caused by smoking, you know. That and emphysema are only the culprits the American Cancer Society targets.

So, what’s the moral of the story? I don’t want to leave you with no hope for smokers you might know, or for yourself, if you are a smoker. Here is the remainder of my theory: If you are a smoker, or you know someone who is, and you haven’t developed a long-time, heavy habit, by all means quit. I don’t think it applies to the casual smoker. If longevity and high use are established, then I recommend that you don’t quit altogether, but cut your usage to fewer than a pack per day. Find a substitute that works equally well to suppress your addiction and your habit.

Of course, the best prevention is not to ever get started with smoking. I sure wish I hadn’t.