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Thread: COPD and Why You Should QUIT!

  1. #21
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    Re: COPD and Why You Should QUIT!

    Quote Originally Posted by Double Trouble View Post
    Trouble and Scarface are using it at the moment. I think the worst side effects they've had are sickness and bad dreams. They both gave up the fags 2 weeks ago and it seems to be working so far. It's early days though.
    Blimey how weird - it seems at the moment everybody i know that smokes is giving up.

    Anyway, yes we are using Champix. For me its two weeks stopped today and Danny stopped 2 days after me and his is 2 weeks on Saturday. But and here is the big but, we did this with other aid products last year for 5 months. We started again. Why, to this day i still dont know other than, other smokers encourage it, its like you left their club and they want you back.

    Anyway side effects of Champix;;;

    I stopped taking it this morning, i cant do the erratic sleep or nightmares any more and this is what its done to me.
    It does work at putting you off smoking and it helps the cravings enormously, you still get them but they are very mild and almost irrelevant. The habit is still the hardest thing to beat i think and Champix cant really help you with that, you have to deal with that yourself. For example - when you have a coffee in the morning, you would automatically reach for the fag, this is habit rather than the need for a fix. When sitting in traffic, reach for the fags, this is also habit rather than fix.

    I hate smoking, always have always will but here i am, dispite having give up smoking a totol of four times, the longest for three years, still fighting the weed. This time is different to the other times though. I am resigned to the fact that, i can no longer afford it, full stop, no discussions, thats it, ive never had that before. it used to bug me the cost but now its a necessity.

    But and rather interestingly any health concerns dont come into it, I dont care, if fags were only 10p a packet i would still smoke.

    I am more bothered about the smell of my clothes when i smoke and my hair etc than thinking i could die of a lung related illness. I think this sort of thinking is because you never think its going to happen to you but only other people.

    Oh and i am currently sorting out life insurance quotes, we cant afford to get it now because we smoked. In one years time, if we are still non smokers the premium goes down by 70% - this is another reason.

    Oh and gettting married also has spurred me on because i cant stand the thought of being a bride all dressed up feminine and gorgeous with a fag hanging out of my gob.!!

    All financial and cosmetic for me but working still the same.

    Anyway, my name is Trouble and im a non smoker.......

  2. #22
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    Re: COPD and Why You Should QUIT!

    There are some really touching stories here - and well done JayJay! Keep going.

    I've never smoked *ahem* 'regular' cigarettes; somehow never got around to trying them, was never offered them by friends (boring lot, eh). And as an adult, never felt a huge desire to try them either ... and when I got to about 25, thought I might just stay cigarette-free. I do wonder, however, how much of that is due to my father, a heavy smoker, showing me what cigarette smoke does when I was about 13. He inhaled a lung-full of cigarette smoke and exhaled onto a large pad of cotton wool. The cotton wool turned dark grey/black instantly and looked vile. If you figured that all of that was going into your lungs in just one cigarette ... perhaps that's what kept cigarettes and I away from each other.

    He gave up cigarettes a number of times and I'm not sure if he's still off them or has a few.

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    Re: COPD and Why You Should QUIT!

    Quote Originally Posted by Trouble View Post
    We started again. Why, to this day i still dont know other than, other smokers encourage it, its like you left their club and they want you back.
    So true, my 'smoking' friends faces drop when I say I have stopped, it is like I have let them down. I know because I felt like that too. It made me feel bad deep down as I knew it was what I should be doing and also it put me in even more of a minority group!

    Quote Originally Posted by Trouble View Post
    I am more bothered about the smell of my clothes when i smoke and my hair etc
    Only sometimes could I smell it on others because I was probably immune to the smell, but I have noticed this week, people that I work with and have never smelt it on before absolutely reek.........so I apologise for all those dances I have had where my partner feels he should be wearing a nose clip...or indeed all those that wouldn't dance with me before.........I now smell lovely


    LOL Just like Michele said............I am Jay Jay and I am a non smoker

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    Re: COPD and Why You Should QUIT!

    Quote Originally Posted by Trouble View Post
    Anyway, my name is Trouble and im a non smoker.......
    Quote Originally Posted by Jay Jay View Post
    ...I am Jay Jay and I am a non smoker
    Or maybe you should be thinking of yourself as a smoker who needs to stay quitting.

    I remember when my dad quit. He changed his brand of coffee and told me "no wonder you used to turn down our coffee, that Somerfield own-label powdered tasted like weak gravy and I'd never tasted it while I was smoking". I still try to avoid their coffee, but that's because my mum absent-mindedly puts in one or two extra sugars

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    Re: COPD and Why You Should QUIT!

    Quote Originally Posted by Jay Jay View Post
    Only sometimes could I smell it on others because I was probably immune to the smell, but I have noticed this week, people that I work with and have never smelt it on before absolutely reek.........so I apologise for all those dances I have had where my partner feels he should be wearing a nose clip...or indeed all those that wouldn't dance with me before.........I now smell lovely
    It's funny - after quitting, I became a lot more aware of the smoking smells than I'd ever been before I started smoking. Nowadays - well - it still turns my stomach sometimes. I suspect it always will.

    I still wonder why I ever started smoking. I still have no good answer to that.

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    Re: COPD and Why You Should QUIT!

    Tobacco and Tobacco smoke contain traces of Polonium, it comes from the Phosphate fertilisers that are used on Tobacco plants. Polonium is a potent alpha-emitter. In simple terms, the radiation from this highly radioactive substance smashes up the building blocks of your body on an atomic and molecular scale. Then you get lung cancer.

    Polonium is the same substance implicated in the death of the Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko. The quantity required to kill is absolutely minute, it makes cyanide look like a relatively weak poison.

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    Re: COPD and Why You Should QUIT!

    Quote Originally Posted by Bubble View Post
    Tobacco and Tobacco smoke contain traces of Polonium, it comes from the Phosphate fertilisers that are used on Tobacco plants. Polonium is a potent alpha-emitter. In simple terms, the radiation from this highly radioactive substance smashes up the building blocks of your body on an atomic and molecular scale. Then you get lung cancer.
    If it was that simple all you'd have to do to make smoking safe is grow tobacco using fertilisers that don't contain polonium.

    Smoking has a huge number of risk factors.

    But it's not repeating those risk factors that will convince people to quit. Not nowadays. Every smoker knows it will kill them. It says so on the packet! Different people will find different reasons to quit. It could be financial, it could even be something silly like your hair goes curly when you stand outside. But there's got to be a reason to quit - the certainty of early and painful demise hasn't done it for people who smoke nowadays. Or are people still thinking it won't happen to them?

  8. #28
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    Re: COPD and Why You Should QUIT!

    Hmm... ok well here's a thought... I don't know the numbers but I'm guessing that millions of people die each year from stress related diseases.

    Stress is a factor in all or lives and unlike many other forms of disease the effect it has on you is not always entirely obvious.

    If someone has 1 or 2 cigarettes a day (I'm not talking chain smokers here) that they believe (whether it's true or not) relieves the stresses of every day life - could one argue that this form of 'self medication' is actually more beneficial than harmful given the alternative?

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    Re: COPD and Why You Should QUIT!

    Quote Originally Posted by Rocky View Post
    could one argue that this form of 'self medication' is actually more beneficial than harmful given the alternative?
    No!

    There is no successful "argument" that there are any terapeutic benefits from smoking. The argument that smoking has a medicinal use in "stress" is a very weak argument indeed. There is no argument which says you should smoke for a particular reason - however, there are some cases where it would be wrong to quit smoking at this time in someone's life.

    On the specific subject of "stress" as Rocky calls it - let's call it anxiety if we're going to sound vaguely medical, there are plenty of treatments for anxiety which have less unattractive unwanted effects than smoking. Not all of those treatments are chemical - one non-chemical treatment is called CBT and it's been shown to be very effective when applied well and appropriately.

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    Re: COPD and Why You Should QUIT!

    I do remember when I was pregnant many moons ago, the doctor actually told me that if I smoked less than 5 a day it was okay! (my my how times have changed) but having told me that and knowing that I could have one if I wanted to I didn't smoke at all.......until I went in to labour, then unbelievably I went in to the patients 'smoking room' at the hospital to have one!

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    Re: COPD and Why You Should QUIT!

    Quote Originally Posted by Trouble View Post
    We started again. Why, to this day i still dont know other than, other smokers encourage it, its like you left their club and they want you back.
    I've never been an overly heavy drinker, but, for a mixture of reasons I stopped drinking a few years back.
    1. It costs a lot of money.
    2. I started dancing MJ
    3. I like to be able to drive my car whenever I want, I'd never drink and drive, and I need my car for MJ
    4. I don't miss any of the effects of drinking

    The resistance I encountered from my so called 'friends' when I stopped drinking was hard to believe. For about the first month I was pestered non-stop to 'have a real drink'. It's easy to see why someone would fold and 'just have one' under the kind of peer pressure I encountered.

    I hate to say this, but if your friends push you like that:
    1. They're not really your friends because they're not considering your best interests, just their own selfish desire not to change the situation they're most comfortable with (maybe your resolve to quit is making them feel weak-willed)
    2. You may need to find some new people to hang out with

    Quote Originally Posted by Andy McGregor View Post
    If it was that simple all you'd have to do to make smoking safe is grow tobacco using fertilisers that don't contain polonium.
    The Tobacco industry tried options to reduce the amount of Polonium making it into the final product. Their efforts weren't very successful so they buried all their research data on Polonium in Tobacco for 40 years until forced to reveal it.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/01/op...01proctor.html

    As you quite rightly point out, there's plenty of other toxins in tobacco smoke. However, Polonium is quite unique as it's the only one that could be compared to breathing in nuclear waste. If that doesn't put people off smoking then I don't know what will.

    Quote Originally Posted by Andy McGregor View Post
    Or are people still thinking it won't happen to them?
    Everyone knows someone with a gran that's been smoking 40/day since age 14 and is still as sprightly as ever.

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    Re: COPD and Why You Should QUIT!

    Quote Originally Posted by Bubble View Post
    Everyone knows someone with a gran that's been smoking 40/day since age 14 and is still as sprightly as ever.
    Those grans are made of different stuff

    Of course we don't know the grans who died because they're not around.

    My English gran died of smoking related disease in her 80s - but lasted that long on 40 a day untipped Senior Service. My Scottish gran didn't smoke and lived for about as long, but she died more peacefully

    The statistics are quite startling about smoking. It seems that you can divide smokers in two, those who will have their lives significantly shortened and those who will not. And you can divide the former group in two again - those who will lose 8 years off their life expectancy and those who will lose 20-30 years

    It's those people who don't have their lives significantly shortened who are the beacon to the hardened smoker.

  13. #33
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    Re: COPD and Why You Should QUIT!

    Quote Originally Posted by Andy McGregor View Post
    No!

    There is no successful "argument" that there are any terapeutic benefits from smoking. The argument that smoking has a medicinal use in "stress" is a very weak argument indeed. .
    Well I think you're completely ignoring the fact that the power of someone's mind and what they believe disputes that - look at placebo effects.

    It's possible that the placebo effect can create profound physiological changes in a patient and whilst the power of placebos can be disputed, and often is, the general consensus seems to be that more research needs to be done.

    Seperate to that I don't think that anyone disputes that having a positive mental attitude changes how people live their lives - there are millions of books on the subject: and that in itself is nothing more than a placebo effect and that manifestly does produce results...

    If someone leads an incredibly stressful life and truly believes that a cigarette at the end of the day helps to relieve that stress are you really saying that person is likely to suffer the same stress levels (with the resultant potential beneficial effects on their percieved health) as someone with no branch to grab hold of and no end in sight to the day in day out drudgery of their life?

    Well of course your are - but I don't believe it!

    I just don't think you can be so black and white about it. Here's another example: lets say someone chooses to reach for a cigarette at the end of the day rather than a bottle of wine - who is doing more harm to their health?

    Very few people lead a totally vice free life so to be black and white on what people should or shouldn't do without taking a holistic approach to how they actually live their lives IMO is blinkered in the extreme. Someone who exercises a few times a week, and who eats fruit and vegetables every day, drinks green tea, and has the occasional glass of red wine along with a cigarette is surely going to be healthier than a lard ass who drinks 5 pints a lager a night and eats junk food.

    It is all about perspective and a blanket approach of 'you can't do this' is possibly one of the reasons why some smokers will not listen to that argument.

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    Re: COPD and Why You Should QUIT!

    Quote Originally Posted by Rocky View Post
    - snip nearly sensible ranting -

    It is all about perspective and a blanket approach of 'you can't do this' is possibly one of the reasons why some smokers will not listen to that argument.
    I think Rocky's rant is correct for anything excepting smoking. As I said, there is no argument where smoking is good for you, none at all. You'd not take it up to relieve stress as there are safer alternatives. So why keep it up for the same reasons?

    However, Rocky is right that we don't all work to logic, we have emotions and feelings too. However, Rocky joined this debate with a reasoned proposal that smoking is good for stress - that is a logical argument rather than one based on emotion.

    Come on Rocky, you can't say something is logical and then use an emotional defence when you're told you're wrong.

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    Re: COPD and Why You Should QUIT!

    Quote Originally Posted by Andy McGregor View Post
    Come on Rocky, you can't say something is logical and then use an emotional defence when you're told you're wrong.
    Yes I can, and stop picking on me..

    I'm off to have a cigarette now, you're messing with my mellow..

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    Re: COPD and Why You Should QUIT!

    Quote Originally Posted by Rocky View Post
    Yes I can, and stop picking on me..

    I'm off to have a cigarette now, you're messing with my mellow..
    I was going to end my last post "unless you're a girl". But I decided against it as girls might feel insulted.

    Now Rocky has flounced off I suppose I'll have to buy him flowers and chocolate and beg to be forgiven

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    Re: COPD and Why You Should QUIT!

    Quote Originally Posted by Andy McGregor View Post
    I was going to end my last post "unless you're a girl". But I decided against it as girls might feel insulted.

    Now Rocky has flounced off I suppose I'll have to buy him flowers and chocolate and beg to be forgiven
    Lovely, and don't forget the pack of Golden Virginia.. (Of course if Fletch had written that it would have said Golden Vaginia.. which is a vice of an entirely different kind..)

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    Re: COPD and Why You Should QUIT!

    Quote Originally Posted by Rocky View Post
    Of course if Fletch had written that it would have said Golden Vaginia.. which is a vice of an entirely different kind..
    Can you get those in packs of twenty?

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    Re: COPD and Why You Should QUIT!

    Quote Originally Posted by Bubble View Post
    Can you get those in packs of twenty?
    Yes, they go under the name of 'Old Shag'...

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    Re: COPD and Why You Should QUIT!

    Quote Originally Posted by Andy McGregor View Post
    There is no argument which says you should smoke for a particular reason -

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