Author: Shruti Agrawal

How Can I Self-Quit Smoking/Chewing Successfully?

In one of my blogs earlier, I had described how to quit smoking by self; based on the experience and tried method of a friend. This method to self-quit had helped many individuals in Raj’s (my friend) circle to quit without fail. However, it is a time taking process and will require tenacious dedication from you for at least 6 months to see the results. Besides, not everyone would be able to get the same results as Raj had.

Therefore in this blog, I shall introduce to you a wonderful book that will make your quitting easy and simple. It enumerates ABC of quitting both effectively and successfully. The book is titled “Win Over Tobacco Made Easy” authored by Dr. Pawan Gupta, a renowned oncologist, author and social activist with 25+ years of experience and more than 7000 successful surgeries to his name.

Studies have demonstrated that hardly 7% people across the globe have successfully quit by self. In India, the relapse rate is extremely high. Those who have tried to quit have relapsed in the second month of their quitting! Often I hear tobacco users saying that “I have a strong will power and I can quit any time I want.” But if their willpower is really that strong, then why aren’t they able to quit? Why the relapse rate is so high and quit rate so low?

The answer is very simple. Neither do the majority of tobacco users have strong willpower nor does the internet give them the right knowledge to quit by self. Instead of trying and testing multiple methods of quitting and failing every time, it is better to access the right resource and knowledge on quitting effectively. That’s why I recommend this book by Dr. Gupta who has made quitting simpler and manageable.

This book is available in 2 languages – English and Hindi and over a million copies have been sold already to help many tobacco users quit efficiently. Why not then grab your copy today and make life healthier? This book is available on https://www.icancare.org/book-win-over-tobacco-made-easy-60. Order today either for yourself or for your friend/relative/spouse who wants to self-quit or has failed in quitting multiple times (and still unwilling to seek professional help) but is positive about quitting.

I’m sure this book will enlighten you about the steps you must follow while quitting, the do’s and don’ts, what are withdrawal symptoms and how to manage them, how to design a plan of action in quitting, assessing self-health and most importantly it will help you to audit and monitor your own progress of quitting. This will enable you to understand what is going good for you, what is affecting you and how to improvise your action plan to make quitting successful.

In a nutshell this book will tell you “How to Quit” your habit of tobacco. Grab your copy without any delay and add atleast 13 more years of life to yourself by quitting a disease!

Will I Get a Heart Attack from Smoking / Chewing?

Is Your Heart Healthy or Did You Experience a Heart Attack? Write in the Comments Below.

When someone asks you, “What is the health problem of tobacco consumption?” your immediate answer is “It causes Cancer”. Another answer might be “Nothing! I have not experienced anything yet. I have been smoking/chewing since years and I’m still healthy.” However, do you know that tobacco consumption can cause other diseases too? Have you ever got yourself screened to really know the damage tobacco has already caused in your body?

Tobacco consumption causes numerous chronic diseases of which Cardio-Vascular Diseases(CVDs), Stroke, CRD, TB, Asthma, COPD and NCDs are the most frequently caused diseases besides cancer. And, in this blog, I will enumerate on heart diseases caused by smoking/consuming smokeless tobacco products.

Let me tell you a few quick and interesting facts. As per the Factsheet released by WHO in 2018, deaths due to tobacco in India was more than 1 million and 48% of the deaths were due to CVD, 23% due to CRD and only 10% due to cancer. This is extremely alarming that more deaths are caused due to heart related diseases than cancer due to tobacco use. 4,49,844 deaths from CVDs could have been prevented if these people had quit tobacco on time (in 2018).

WHO Fact Sheet 2018

It is true that smoking/chewing can give you a heart attack or any other form of heart disease at some point in time in your life if you continue to consume tobacco regularly and do not quit on time. Smoking increases the risk of coronary heart disease by 200%-400%. I’m sure not many people would be aware about it.

Smoking Increases Risk of Heart Disease by 200%-400%

The question is how does smoking/smokeless tobacco cause a heart attack or disease?

Tobacco smoke contains high levels of carbon monoxide (CO) that affects the heart directly. CO reduces the oxygen carrying capacity of the blood. Vital organs like the heart, lungs, brains, kidney, etc. do not always receive the right level of oxygen to perform everyday functions. This implies the heart has to pump more and harder to supply the right oxygen to the organs thereby increasing the heart rate and blood pressure. Over time, this causes constant “wear and tear” on the cardiovascular system thus causing a heart attack, high BP, blood clots, strokes, hemorrhages, aneurysms and other disorders.

Use of smokeless tobacco products increases the risk of high blood pressure and heart rate. However, no study has proven that a severe heart disease can be caused due to smokeless tobacco consumption. This does not imply that a smoker should switch to smokeless form because oral cancer is caused in 98% of the smokeless tobacco consumers.

Smoking increases the risks for the following diseases:

  • Coronary heart disease
  • Rheumatic heart disease
  • Hypertension
  • Ischemic heart disease
  • Pulmonary heart disease
  • Cardiac arrest
  • Cerebrovascular disease
  • Atherosclerosis
  • Aortic aneurysm
  • Chest pain
  • Arrhythmia

What Else Can Smoking Do?

  • Increase the level of triglycerides in your body
  • Lower the “good” cholesterol level (HDL)
  • Make blood sticky and more likely to clot, which can block blood flow to the heart and brain
  • Damage the cells that line the blood vessels, leading to build up of fatty material (atheroma) which narrows the artery which causes angina, heart attack or stroke.
  • Increase the  build-up of plaque (fat, cholesterol, calcium and other substances) in blood vessels
  • Cause thickening and narrowing of blood vessels thereby harming blood circulation
  • It can also cause sudden cardiac death of all types in both men and women

“Beyond its status as an independent risk factor, smoking appears to have a multiplicative interaction with the other major risk factors for CHD—high serum levels of lipids, untreated hypertension, and diabetes mellitus (USDHHS 1983). For instance, if the presence of smoking alone doubles the level of risk, the simultaneous presence of another major risk factor is estimated to quadruple the risk (2 × 2). The presence of two other risk factors with smoking results in approximately eight times the risk (2 × 2 × 2) of persons with no risk factors.” (NCBI, 2010).

There is no doubt that smoking will definitely cause a heart attack or other forms of heart diseases. It is therefore important to quit immediately, if not, then identify the symptoms as soon as possible before it becomes severe and seek help to quit the habit of smoking.

References

Rostron BL, Chang JT, Anic GM, et al Smokeless tobacco use and circulatory disease risk: a systematic review and meta-analysis Open Heart 2018; 5:e000846. doi: 10.1136/openhrt-2018-000846

Office on Smoking and Health, National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, January 2019, https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/campaign/tips/diseases/heart-disease-stroke.html, accessed in July 2019

Amy Lukowski, PsyD (August 2015), https://www.nationaljewish.org/health-insights/smoking-and-tobacco-use/health/coronary-heart-disease-and-tobacco, accessed in July 2019

British Heart Foundation, https://www.bhf.org.uk/informationsupport/risk-factors/smoking, accessed in July 2019

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (US); National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion (US); Office on Smoking and Health (US). How Tobacco Smoke Causes Disease: The Biology and Behavioral Basis for Smoking-Attributable Disease: A Report of the Surgeon General. Atlanta (GA): Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (US); 2010. 6, Cardiovascular Diseases. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK53012/

Self-Care – A Need of the Hour

#knowtobacco
How Do You Self-Care? Write Your Comments Below.

When World Health Organization (WHO) released its first guidelines on “Self-Care Interventions for Sexual and Reproductive Health and Right”, there was an immediate realization of the gravity of self-care interventions. As per estimates, WHO mentioned that the world will fall short of 13 million healthcare providers by 2035 leaving at least 400 million people devoid of necessary healthcare services.

It is imperative to adopt self-care in different facets of healthcare to fill this gap and ensure that people have access to essential services as required for adequate treatment and support. Self-Care implies that a person or their family “promote health, prevent disease, maintain health, and cope with illness and disability with or without the support of a health-care provider” (WHO). This means that one should adopt the following habits in their routine with immediate effect to ensure that they are able to care for themselves and get the right treatment on time without delay:

IDENTIFY ANY CHANGE IN THE BODY

  • One must identify any sign or change occurring in one’s body. It may be a small change or a major one, which does not occur routinely.
  • Search for references on the internet for the cause of the sign and symptoms and self-detect through available kits to identify the cause of the symptom
  • If one is unable to find out the source of the symptoms, then report it to the concerned physician immediately and get it diagnosed to seek proper treatment

STOP LIVING WITH THE DISEASE

In India, it is a normal practice to procrastinate visiting a doctor and people get used to the symptoms occurring in their body. They start living with those symptoms and after sometime it becomes so severe that visiting a doctor become inevitable. There the patient gets to know about the severity of the disease and that they should have visited earlier when the first signs occurred. Make it a habit to not neglect your own health, for not only will you suffer your entire family will suffer and experience a lot of stress and trauma.

GO FOR YEARLY FULL BODY CHECK-UP

Doctors recommend to have a full body check-up once a year to know the current health status and compare it with the previous record. This helps the person to know what they should be doing to keep them healthy.

ADOPT HEALTHY HABITS

Every healthcare professional will tell you to eat healthy and exercise regularly. These are the 2 most important aspects of keeping healthy habits. But there are a few more which are as critically important as eating healthy and exercising.

  • Maintaining hygiene in everyday life both personally and socially
  • Teaching kids to maintain personal hygiene and keeping surrounding clean
  • Not spitting anywhere and everywhere
  • Avoiding smoking in public places, hospitals, children, etc.
  • Not reusing disposables of family members
  • Adopting preventive care

The list is endless. It is upto us how well we adopt the healthy habits, practice, preach and propagate them to the community to make our place greener and healthier to live.

EXTEND SUPPORT

There are many instances that a particular disease is looked upon as social stigma in our society and those suffering from them are completed neglected or socially ignored. HIV AIDS is one such disease. In such instances, the patient becomes morally depressed and loses self-confidence. This impacts their psychological behavior and they give up on their treatment easily leading to their death. We need to become more supportive and prevent the community from inflicting such taboos. We must support the patient emotionally and financially so that they are able to cope with the disease and get themselves treated.

This reminds me of people who want to quit smoking or chewing. They face similar problems while quitting – LACK OF SUPPORT! If we care for them and extend support during their withdrawal symptoms and cravings, they can quit with ease and determination and will require minimum physician’s intervention.

Remember one simple mantra:
जब भी देखो छोटा दाना,
उसकी पहचान जल्द ही करना,
कैंसर को ना बनने दो नासूर,
शिग्रह करो इसे दूर!

#knowtobacco
Get the “Chota Daana” screened and diagnosed asap

Self-Care from tobacco use is the need of the hour. India needs the non-tobacco consumers to adopt a tobacco user and help them quit by acting as a buddy to them. Cessation experts are available for help in case of failing to quit by self. They make the quit process easy and simple. Identifying the early signs, late signs, advanced signs and co-morbidity of the harms of tobacco use will help the individual get themselves treated on time and prevent oral cancer, lung cancer, CVD, Stroke, COPD< Astham, TB, and other NCDs from happening. This is the best and immediate self-care one can do for themselves.

It should be noted here that smoking releases carcinogens and those inhaling it are also at a risk of chronic diseases from this Second-Hand Smoke (SHS). Detection kits are available to let you know the impact of SHS on your body. This makes it necessary for non-smokers to take care of themselves too for they might be exposed to SHS without them realizing it.

In all, Self-Care is extremely essential for everyone for early realization, detection, diagnosis and treatment of the diseases occurring in their body. This is my appeal to everyone to have your own guidelines for self-caring your body. This will help you live longer and disease free. It is also an appeal to all the tobacco users, both smokers and chewers, to start self-caring for themselves as tobacco use will definitely cause them some chronic disease at some point in their lives.