House Call: Quitting smoking brings nearly instant benefits to your health

Nov. 17 is the Great American Smokeout, so I’d like to write about the effects of smoking on your body.

Over the years I have watched countless patients struggle to stop smoking and tried to help them. The health benefits make the struggle worth it. My father was a two pack a day smoker and died at 57 from lung cancer. My brother died at 42 from emphysema from heavy smoking, and I’ve seen too many patients to count suffer from the illnesses caused by smoking. You could say that I have feelings about this.

There are both immediate and long-term health benefits from stopping smoking. Of the immediate health benefits, some of the things that improve may not even be things that you realize have changed until they start to go back to normal. Within 20 minutes, your heart rate and blood pressure will start to return to normal levels. We all have a small “normal” amount of nicotine and carbon monoxide in our blood, but they are much higher in smokers. The amounts of these chemicals and of oxygen in the blood begin to return to normal after not smoking for eight hours.

Two days after stopping smoking, your lungs begin to clear and your senses of taste and smell start to return to normal. On day three of not smoking, your energy levels increase and breathing becomes easier. This is because you have less carbon monoxide in your blood. Carbon monoxide binds to the same sites in your red blood cells as oxygen, but more tightly, reducing the amount of oxygen that your blood can carry.

The next changes take a bit longer. After a few weeks, your circulation improves and exercise gets easier, and the long-term toxic effects of smoking begin to reverse. Improved circulation means that you will heal faster from injuries or surgery. A patient of mine had ankle surgery and after a year the bones had still not healed. When he stopped smoking, his ankle healed in about a month.

Finally, two to three months after you stop smoking your breathing will become easier. You will cough and wheeze less and feel short of breath less often. During the first two months after quitting, your lungs may feel worse. They are recovering ability to move crap out of your body and they have some catching up to do.

For long-term benefits of quitting smoking, let’s start with the obvious one: cancer. Lung, throat, GI tract, breast and cervix to name a few. While it is true that people who never smoked and were not exposed to lots of secondhand smoke get cancer, it is not common. Between 80 and 90 percent of lung cancer can be attributed to smoking.

Smoking greatly increases your risk of having a stroke, heart attack, and other arterial problems like impotence and inadequate blood supply to the feet and legs. This can make it painful to walk, or even lead to loss of a foot or leg.

I hope you find these to be some good reasons to stop smoking. Quitting smoking is really hard, and most people who have quit have tried more than once before they finally stop for good, so don’t give up. Most insurance companies have stop-smoking programs that are free or low cost, and there are effective medications to help if you can’t do it on your own. Even if you don’t have good coverage for those things, the medications generally cost less than tobacco, so they are worth the price. Every day that you don’t smoke is a win for you.

Dr. Bob Riggs is a family medicine physician practicing at Group Health’s Riverfront Medical Center.