thehonestdoctor.com

Now if that title to this post doesn’t make me sound like a snake oil salesman, I don’t know what would. 

But hold on a minute.  I guarantee you, without selling you anything, I can provide some of you with all three of those things by recommending one simple decision.

Stop smoking.

Now, if you’re reading this blog, I assume you’re interested in your health and longevity, and so perhaps not many of you are smokers.  But for those of you that are, listen to me carefully.  There is no single decision you can make that will have a more positive effect on your odds of living a long healthy life than deciding to stop smoking.  Forget about the rest of the information in this blog, if you’re a smoker, quitting is absolutely, positively, top priority, job number one.

The first step toward giving up tobacco use is actually wanting to quit.  I’ve had smokers in my Internal Medicine practice who reported half-hearted attempts to stop smoking, but when I really questioned them I discovered they didn’t truly want to stop.  They enjoyed it to much.  They rationalized it by claiming they had no other vices, they needed it to relax, or they were too stressed to try to quit.  These are all excuses.

If you’re honest with yourself and you fall in this category, let me see if I can give you some motivation to quit, based on the title of this article:  more money, better looks, longer life.

More money is obvious.  Cigarettes are expensive.  At $4.50 per pack, you can estimate a one pack per day smoker spends directly around $140 per month just on the direct costs of buying the tobacco.  That’s enough to pay for a nice year-end vacation or pay most people’s cable and cell phones bills every month.  If you smoke two packs per day - forget about it.  Quit, and you can take the money and go lease yourself a new Mercedes.  And those are just the direct costs; when you figure in the increased cost of life and health insurance, dry cleaning, vehicle depreciation, and increased health care needs, the numbers are staggering.  It may even reduce your job marketability, as many employers look specifically for nonsmokers.  There’s an excellent article on the costs of smoking on MSN money you can check out here.

Better looks is a more subtle benefit.  There is no doubt that smoking takes its toll on your appearance.  Long-term smokers are obvious to most people; the dry, leathery, wrinkled skin, yellow teeth and nails, and hair loss are dead give-aways.  The awful breath and unpleasant musky odor that clings to them enhances the detrimental effects on their appearance.  If you not only want to limit your lifespan but also look prematurely old, than smoking is a great way to go about it.

But the most important benefit of quitting tobacco is the longer life.  I honestly believe there is no single step a smoker can take to improve their life odds more than to quit (that is, unless you have very high risk habits - you’re not a base jumper who doesn’t know how to pack his parachute very well, are you? )  Of the leading causes of death in the U.S., tobacco use dramatically increases your risk for all of the top four - heart disease, stroke, cancer, and chronic lung disease.  Yearly those four disorders cause around 1.5 million deaths in the U.S. alone.  There is no other single step you can take that will reduce your risk more for all of the leading killers simultaneously.

So now the motivation part is out of the way.  Even once you really want to quit, you may still find it difficult however.  But don’t tell me it’s impossible for you.  Don’t be like my patient who told me he’d tried every way of quitting and had failed, so he’d given up.  He went on to later have stroke-like symptoms which fortunately resolved within 24 hours.  I told him before he left the hospital if he resumed smoking he would almost certainly return before long with another stroke or heart attack and probably wouldn’t be as lucky.  He quit smoking that day.  He’d finally found the proper motivation for him.  I recommend that you not wait for such a motivational event.  Not everyone gets a warning shot across their bow - a third of patients die with their first heart attack.

After discussing it with your doctor, consider trying to quit smoking first by simply setting a quit date, and going cold turkey.  Get all the cigarettes out of the house and get away from the people and settings that tend to trigger your craving to smoke.  Break your routine.  Use the over-the-counter nicotine patch, gum, or lozenge to help fight the cravings if you want.  This method might yield around a 20% success rate for you.

If you fail, try to figure out want went wrong, and keep trying until you succeed.  Consider hypnotism, acupuncture, or biofeedback, all of which I’ve seen work for some patients and even worst case are very unlikely to do you harm.  Don’t worry about the associated costs; even if you spent a thousand dollars or more trying to quit, once you succeed you’ll recoup that money in no time (see the paragraph about “more money” above).  These things might improve your success rate to 30-50%.

If you still fail, speak with your doctor about Zyban (modestly effective in my opinion) or Chantix (much more effective).  These are drug therapies taken for a short while, usually 2-3 months, targeted to help you quit smoking.  Both have some risk of side effects (usually mild), but for most people the potential benefit far outweighs the risk.  Trying this route should improve your quit rate into the 50-80% range.

See, I told you the honest doctor would give you a single recommendation that would give you more money, better looks, and a longer life.

If you smoke, find a way to quit, and don’t stop working at it until you do.  Act as though your life depends on it, because it does.