We run special clinics for patients who are trying to quit smoking.
Please telephone the surgery or inquire at reception.
Quitting smoking is the best thing you can do for your health.
Smoking harms nearly every organ of the body and seriously effects your overall health. It can cause life-threatening and life-changing illnesses including cancer, heart disease, lung disease and stroke. It also stains your skin and teeth, making you look older.
Tobacco smoke contains over 7,000 chemical compounds, present as either gases or as tiny particles. These include carbon monoxide, arsenic, formaldehyde, cyanide, benzene, toluene and acrolein.
There are many benefits to stopping!
- Immediately after quitting smoking, heart rate and blood pressure, which is abnormally high while smoking, begin to return to normal.
- Within a few hours, the level of carbon monoxide, which reduces the blood’s ability to carry oxygen, begins to decline.
- Within a few weeks, circulation improves, you don’t produce as much phlegm, and you don’t cough or wheeze as often.
- The workload on the heart is decreased and cardiac function is improved.
- Food tastes better, and your sense of smell returns to normal.
- Everyday activities no longer leave you out of breath.
- Within several months of quitting, you experience significant improvements in lung function.
- In one year, your risk of heart disease, heart attack, and stroke is halved.
- In five years, many kinds of cancer, including lung, larynx, mouth, stomach, cervix, bladder, show decline in risk, and that decline approaches the risk of someone who has never smoked.
- Within 10 to 15 years, risk of lung disease, including bronchitis and emphysema, are decreased.
- Conditions such as cataracts, macular degeneration, thyroid conditions, hearing loss, dementia, and osteoporosis are positively affected.
- Nerve endings in the mouth and nose begin to regenerate, improving taste and smell.
- Medications may work better, enabling some to be taken in decreased doses.
- If you’re taking birth control pills, quitting smoking will decrease your chance of heart attack and stroke due to clotting.
- You’ll have decreased risk for impotence and infertility.
- If you’re pregnant, you’ll protect your unborn child from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) and low birth weight.
- Years will be added to your life: people who quit smoking, regardless of their age, are less likely than those who continue to smoke to die from smoking-related illness.