Quit smoking, stop heart problems: Cardiologists

Wed, Jun 25 09:31 PM

Stay away from smoking and fast food, advocate eminent cardiologsits to youths as the number of young people suffering from heart problems are on the increase.

The number young people coming with heart ailments for treatment was gradually increasing but no statistics are available,” they said.

It was important to have a national statistics to work on proper policies and programmes to make a healthy society, they said citing the example of American Collelge of Cardiologists’ programme on diet restriction and compulsory exercises for youth.

“Today, it is a scary situation as we get young people in late twenties and thirtees with heart problems,” eminent cardiologist Dr Samuel Mathew told media on Wednesday.

“Since we do not have the statistics on young adults, the civic bodies should prepare epidemiological data so that the country can have proper statistics to work on various policies and programmes,” he said.

Angioplasty is a common intervention choice to avoid bypass surgery and “we try to avoid surgery on a young person and even angioplasty,” he said.

Mathew demonstrated today two difficult cases of 100 per cent blockages in patients (71-year-old man and 47-year-old woman) with low heart function for the benefit of 1,500 cardiologists who were attending the international cardiology meet at Bangkok.

Other doctors who participated in the angioplasty demosntration were Jamshed Dalal, Anil Sharma, Nitin Gokhale and Ajit Menon.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: stopsmoking san francisco

Ellen Degeneres quits smoking with hypnosis

Matt Damon, Drew Barrymore,  Ben Affleck and many other celebrities have quit smoking with hypnosis.

Why Don’t We Talk About Smoking and Celebrity Deaths?

Actress Suzanne Pleshette’s recent death from “respiratory distress” was sad. Most of the articles about it briefly mention that she had been fighting lung cancer, but fail to mention that she had been a cigarette smoker in the past. Cigarette smoking is the single biggest cause of lung cancer.

It is rarely discussed, but tobacco has taken an extraordinarily heavy toll on Hollywood. The list of beloved celebrities killed by smokers’ diseases is huge, and growing: George Harrison, Johnny Carson, Dana Reeve, Yul Brynner, Lucille Ball, Walt Disney, Nat King Cole, Joe DiMaggio, Michael Landon, Sammy Davis, Jr., Dean Martin, Betty Grable, and Babe Ruth to name just a few. Despite this, the failure to mention a person’s smoking history in obituary columns is the norm in celebrity deaths. In just one glaring example, a four page obituary about the 2005 death of prominent news anchor Peter Jennings published by his own network, ABC, fails to mention the contribution that smoking made to Jennings’ tragic and untimely death. A CNN’s column about Jennings’ death didn’t mention it either. Something is up when major news organizations omit any mention the single most prominent cause of the death of a renowned news anchor.

Big Screen Smoking

Silver Screen Star Marlene DietrichSmoking has always been common in the entertainment industry, and Hollywood has a track record of promoting smoking. Lois Lane, a reporter who never smoked throughout her 40 years in Superman comics, was suddenly shown smoking on-screen in the movie Superman II. Tobacco industry documents reveal that Sylvester Stallone signed a contract with Brown & Williamson to plug their brands in five of his movies in exchange for $500,000. A study published in the American Journal of Public Health in 2004 shows that on-screen smoking rates in movies have now returned to rates seen in the 1950s, even though far fewer people smoke now than in the 1950s. Given that smoking was perceived as a more normal activity when Suzanne Pleshette came of age, her smoking wasn’t unusual. As the years went on, she was able to quit. But the harm had already been done.

So why is the media so reticent to mention the part cigarettes play in killing off so many beloved public figures? Probably because of the cruel but popular belief that people who suffer from lung cancer and emphysema have caused their own diseases. Reporters don’t want to be perceived as blaming the victim.

Jacking Up Nicotine

This damaging and misplaced stigma, however, ignores some important information that has emerged from tobacco industry documents: cigarette companies chemically engineer their products to maximize their addictive qualities. In the mid-1970s, cigarette companies began freebasing nicotine by adding ammonia to tobacco. Freebasing is a chemical process that makes smoke slightly more alkaline, resulting in nicotine being converted to a form that is more rapidly absorbed by the body. It gives the smoker a faster, harder “kick” after lighting up.

Tobacco companies that first employed this chemical change, like Philip Morris, won a bigger market share for their products. This did not go unnoticed by competitors, who eventually discovered the change and started freebasing nicotine, too. Ultimately, it became state-of-the-art in cigarette manufacturing. Freebasing is the same chemical process that drug dealers use to turn cocaine into crack. Tobacco companies even use the same chemical that drug dealers use to freebase cocaine, ammonia. But they neglected to ever make consumers aware of this subtle, but powerful, chemical change in cigarettes.

By comparison, heroin, a notoriously addictive illegal drug that has killed a tiny fraction of the celebrities and others killed by cigarettes, doesn’t have this type of chemical engineering, since it doesn’t have wealthy corporate research and development departments working to make them more addictive. This under-the-radar chemical engineering, and its ultimate effect on smokers of making it harder to quit, is one reason why it is unfair to blame smokers for their diseases.

Another reason why media outlets are hesitant to mention smoking as a contributor to celebrity deaths may be that big media conglomerates also now own magazines and other media outlets that still accept advertising from tobacco companies, which themselves own numerous subsidiaries that make non-tobacco products. To repeatedly highlight the part that smoking plays in killing well-known public figures could result in a loss of advertising dollars. Tobacco industry documents show that tobacco companies used to get upset when newspaper publishers placed cigarette ads next to obituary columns and funeral notices, back when most newspapers still accepted cigarette ads.

Read Between the Lines

Reporters may also lack the authoritative documentation they need to back up statements that smoking contributed to a person’s death. Most death certificate forms don’t have an easy way for doctors to indicate the part tobacco played in contributing to someone’s death. Industry documents show that tobacco companies had a hand in this as well. The Tobacco Institute worked quietly behind the scenes to prevent legislation that would allow states to place a check box on death certificates allowing doctors to indicate whether a deceased person had used tobacco. Such a check box would have made it far easier to accumulate data regarding the number of people killed by cigarettes, and would have facilitated tabulation of the overall contribution of cigarettes to the death rate in society. This small change on death certificates posed a distinct threat to tobacco companies. The result is that information quantifying cigarette deaths is more difficult to accumulate than it might be if the cigarette industry not interfered with what can be put on death certificates.

Whatever the reason that smoking is not openly discussed in celebrity deaths, the result is a chronic underreporting of the seriousness of the damage this product is doing to our population. Every celebrity who dies from smoking and about whom we cover up that information is a missed opportunity to educate the public about the toll cigarettes take on society. We need to more clearly define smoking’s contribution to the death rate, so that the living can more clearly see the urgency in minimizing tobacco use.

Written by Anne Landman original article at http://www.prwatch.org/node/6927

Ben Affleck tells Oprah how he quit smoking

Movie hunk Ben Affleck has revealed how pal Matt Damon, his baby daughter and a hypnotist helped him quit smoking.

The Pearl Harbour star admitted he was hooked on cigarettes for almost 20 years before Matt advised him to try hypnosis.

He decided to give it a go for the sake of his daughter Violet, now aged two, when wife Jennifer Garner fell pregnant.

And the treatment worked as Ben gave up puffing his way through at least a pack a day.

He told US talkshow queen Oprah Winfrey he has not had a cigarette for more than two years.

Ben said: “I thought I would give up at 25 and then 30, but that came and went.

“I finally decided to quit smoking when I was going to have a child.

“I actually went to hypnosis. Matt Damon turned me on to this guy.

“Matt quit the year before me. This guy just sat there and told me nicotine is poison.”

By Owen Williams, Jan 23 2008 © Copyright 2008 – Showbiz Spy

Another video about what might happen!

Is all of that going to happen to you? Probably not. Can it? Sure. It comes down to if you are willing to gamble with your life and you might be able to only gamble once.

Wife follows husband’s operation

This not a professionally done video to show how bad smoking is and why you should quit smoking. It is just wife’s commentary what her husband went through because of smoking. However, it gives a pretty good idea what can happen to every day people because of smoking.

See what your body goes thru with each cigarette

Watch this video to see what cigarettes do to smokers’ lungs, liver and other internal organs. It does not happen over night but it still happens. The longer they abuse their body the worse it gets. This video is very graphic so take a look it and see if this makes you want to ever light one up.

SAG President Alan Rosenberg Hypnotized to Stop Smoking TV

Smoking Causes Impotence

Men – need a new reason to quit smoking? Sex. Smoking causes impotence -”Smoking, because it causes blood vessel constriction, is a very big cause of erectile dysfunction,” said Dr. Larry Lipshultz, chief of male reproductive medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.

The report on smoking and impotence, which appeared on Health Day News, found that men who smoke a pack a day are 40% more likely to suffer from erectile dysfunction. “Smoking delivers nicotine and other vasoconstrictors that close down the blood vessels” of the penis, explained Dr. Jack Mydlo, chairman of urology at Temple University School of Medicine and Hospital in Philadelphia.

There are many reasons to quit smoking, I have list of them on the front page of my website, a healthy sex life will soon be added. If you live in San Francisco, or the Bay Area, I offer a smoking cessation treatment using hypnosis in San Francisco. For more information please visit my stop smoking website.

Smoking Costs

One of the reasons you may want to quit smoking is the cost. Smoking is expensive. In San Francisco, the cost of a pack of cigarettes, averages about $5 a pack. The cost of smoking totals $1825 per year. The cost of quitting smoking is a quarter of that amount. So, stopping smoking, is a great investment, that pays for itself very quickly.

A San Francisco retirement planner has calculated, on his Retirement Blog, the cost of smoking on your retirement. He found that if you invested the money you smoke, over a 20 year period, you would earn $115,000. And that to continue to smoke in retirement, would require you to save, an additional $45,000 towards your retirement.

That is a tremendous impact that smoking has on your finances. If you stop smoking, not only will you live longer, but you will also have more money to enjoy those extra years.