Smoking causes the worst destruction one can do to the human body. Smoking cuts the average life span by about a decade. The British Medical Journal sheds light on this statement. It reported a study of seventy thousand Japanese men and women followed for twenty-three years. Men who started smoking at age twenty lived eight fewer years than those who never smoked. Women in the same study structure lived ten fewer years.
Those findings were also reported in a study in Lancet, another British medical journal. They concluded, after analyzing the Million Women Study in Britain, that two-thirds of all female smokers, ages fifty to eighty, die from the effects of their smoking addiction. Plus, smoking shortened those women’s lives by at least ten years.
Time and again, I have had patients who smoked and developed emphysema, lung cancer, or high blood pressure—or had a heart attack—tell me, “If I had only known.” If they had only known then how terrible smoking was to their health, they would never have started smoking or would have quit once they realized. But they didn’t know. Oh, they had seen reports that it was bad for their health, but they never considered its real consequences for them. They always thought the reports were for someone else who smoked. But now, if you are a smoker, you know.
Here’s how bad it can become. I was in surgical training, rotating through the Veteran’s Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky. A male veteran in his fifties who had cancer of his larynx, his voice box, was there. He had developed the cancer because he had been a three-pack-a-day smoker most of his life. The picture is still vivid in my mind today. His voice box, his larynx, had been excised, and he was left with a large tracheotomy hole in the front of his neck to breathe through. He could not speak because his vocal cords had been removed with the cancer. His neck hole was as large as if you placed the tip of your index finger on the tip of your thumb. You would end up forming a large zero, the size of his opening.
And that is exactly the way he held his finger and thumb on the front of his neck, over the hole in his trachea. He took the lit cigarette his friend had handed him and held it in the center of the zero—and inhaled. As he exhaled, a steady cloud of smoke came out through the operative site.
Now, that is the most profound picture of addiction you will ever see. If you smoke, acknowledge how bad this is.
Not only does smoking cause 88 percent of lung cancer, but according to an article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, smoking also increases the risk of developing cancer of your colon by 18 percent. If you do get colon cancer, smoking increases your risk of dying from the malignancy by about 25 percent. The colon is a long way from the lungs, but smoking affects your whole body. I made my living operating on patients who smoked. I tried my best to convince people to quit smoking. I spoke at high schools to students to try to persuade them never to start, and if they did smoke, to give it up. I showed students actual blackened, nicotine-stained lungs of patients who had died from smoking. I did everything I could to encourage young people never to take the first puff.
The huge majority of lung cancer is preventable. What about other malignancies? Wouldn’t it be a shame to come down with any cancer only to find out later that there were things you could have been doing to help prevent that particular cancer—“If I had only known”? You now know how to cut down tremendously on the development of the most common cancers by altering your lifestyle. The rest is up to you.
With that, we put cancer behind us and move on to a subject most think is for men only. But I want to remind both men and women that there is a hidden lesson waiting. And there is a lot more to it than just erectile dysfunction. It is a warning every wife wants her spouse to know about. So, both men and women, continue reading.