Nurse's Notes
2002 View
IT’S TIME TO NAG
Nurses make great “naggers”—family members and friends groan when we
“rag” on them to get their flu shots, get to the dentist, get to the
doctor for the routine check-ups, have yearly mammograms, have that
PSA checked. We see so much that could have been prevented by a
little proactive care that we nag, nag, nag.
Probably my single greatest “nag” right now is about smoking. There
can’t be a literate human in the United States that doesn’t know
smoking is harmful—articles, commercials, handouts at doctor’s
offices—we are bombarded by information about the devastating
effects of tobacco and nicotine. Yet lots of you smoke. I can
somewhat understand those “of a certain age” who started smoking
during or right after WW II, when it was the glamorous thing to
do—remember all those Westerns with John Wayne being the “he-man”
with a cigarette dangling from his mouth? (John Wayne, by the way,
died from lung and stomach cancer.) However, I absolutely can’t
understand younger folks who have started smoking after 1964 when
the Surgeon General’s report on smoking and lung cancer was
released. As my grandkids would say, what was it about that report
you didn’t understand? Eighty-seven percent of all lung cancer is
attributable to smoking! You would NEVER bet on those odds in Las
Vegas!
The bad news, folks, is that it isn’t just lung cancer and emphysema
that you need to worry about, horrible and debilitating as those
diseases are. Recent scientific studies have shown that smoking is
even more harmful than we thought. Good research now links smoking
to cancers of the throat, stomach, liver, bladder, and cervix, and
to the bane of the elderly, osteoporosis. Smokers have more
difficulty recovering from surgery or from injury—for example,
doctors who do limb reconstruction are really hesitant to work on
smokers because of poor bone healing and persistent infections after
surgery.
And if that weren’t bad enough, the effects of long-term smoking can
be permanent. The American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) says
that the structure and/or function of organs may change forever,
making them more susceptible to disease. More bad news is that the
younger a person starts smoking, the more risk there is for
permanent damage even if that person stops smoking after several
years. Stopping smoking at any age stops the tissue destruction but
some tissue may never recover from the damage—however, it doesn’t
get worse!
I haven’t even mentioned the aesthetic reasons for not smoking—the
odor, the “ashtray” breath, the tiny holes burned in clothes and
furniture, the very real danger of house fires, the permanent brown
“glue” on everything in the house of a smoker and the fact your skin
ages faster with considerably more wrinkling.
Most of you are horrified when you hear of someone who is addicted
to heroin. Nicotine is actually more addictive and in some respects
more dangerous—the only difference is that it is a legal drug. Think
about it.
Please, get help if you smoke. Stop. Do it for your family, friends
and the rest of us if not for yourself. It’s an addiction and it’s
dangerous.
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