 |
Smoking: 201 Reasons to Quit by Muriel Crawford Dillon & Parker Publishing
book review by Kathye Fetsko Petrie
"Simply put, there are no benefits to smoking, and the risks are enormous."
Think you know and understand all the dangers of smoking? After reading this book, you will think differently. Sure, there are the well-known smoking-related illnesses: lung and throat cancers, emphysema, heart disease—familiar to the point of cliché and so perhaps easier to be in denial about or dismiss. Muriel Crawford asserts that smoking increases one's risk for type 2 diabetes, an aneurysm, blood clots, a stroke, pancreatic cancer, leukemia, flu and pneumonia, ulcers, osteoporosis, back pain and sciatica, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, chronic insomnia, sleep apnea, impotence and infertility. An aging smoker is more likely to lose abilities that enable independence. Most disturbing is this statement: "Few smokers live to an advanced age."
Scary stuff. But Crawford is not out to frighten so much as make readers understand how and why every part of one's body is affected by smoking, in the hope that such understanding will provide the motivation and determination to stop. To this end, health hazards cited are often followed by an explanation of body systems and interactions, etc. This approach helps the entrenched smoker see the cited hazard as logical and real. Denial becomes more difficult.
Crawford provides a list of chemical ingredients in cigarettes as cited by a national anti-smoking organization. The ingredients include "a paint stripper, a lighter fuel, the chemical in mothballs, a poison used in gas chambers, and a rocket fuel." Tobacco smoke includes "a chemical used in cleaning fluids, a preservative of dead bodies, a chemical used to light blow torches, a material used for brake linings, a heating fuel, and insecticide and weed killer, and a poison with vapors that irritate body tissues."
Crawford cites some surprising time-related facts such as "if you smoke a pack of cigarettes a day, you likely spend one and one-half to two hours a day smoking." The book includes shocking statistics such as "smoking has killed more Americans in the last three years than all the wars fought by the United States since 1775."
The author acknowledges it is enormously difficult to stop smoking. "Drug addicts and alcoholics who smoke say that it is harder to give up smoking than to give up heroin, cocaine or alcohol," she writes. But, she points out, 44 million people have stopped smoking, so it can be done by the reader as well. Yes, nicotine withdrawal will be "difficult and unpleasant." But surley not as difficult as suffering from any of the diseases smoking causes or exacerbates. Additionally, "no record exists of a person dying from nicotine withdrawal. But enormous numbers of people die because they continue to smoke."
Crawford offers encouraging positive motivation by stating the immediate health benefits one can reap by quitting smoking today:
"Twenty minutes after your last cigarette, your blood pressure and pulse rate drop. Eight hours after you quit smoking, the carbon monoxide in your blood drops and the oxygen in your blood increases to normal. Your body will begin to heal itself within 12 hours... The decision to be a nonsmoker will be one of the most important decisions that you ever made," writes Crawford in her book's introduction. Smoking: 201 Reasons to Quit has enough powerful information to be the impetus for making that all-important decision stick.