Smoking linked to more osteoarthritis pain
You gotta love cigarette smokers, if for nothing else but their cognitive dissonance. I used to admire them for their naiveté but four decades after the surgeon general's report on smoking I think any claim of ignorance of the risks of smoking is about as believable as announcing the discovery of the Piltdown Man's girlfriend. Now on top of heart disease, COPD, cancer and rotten teeth we have this little experiment from the Mayo Clinic and two other institutions showing the effects of smoking on the knee joint. The results are not exactly what Big Tobacco is looking to put on their next billboard:
We examined 159 men with symptomatic knee OA who participated in a 30-month, prospective, natural history study of knee OA. The more symptomatic knee was imaged using MRI at baseline, 15- and 30-months follow-up. Cartilage was scored using the WORMS semi- quantitative method at the medial and lateral tibiofemoral joint and at the patellofemoral joint. At baseline and follow-up visits, the severity of knee pain was assessed using a visual analogue scale (VAS) pain score (0-100 mm).
Among the 159 men, 19 (12%) were current smokers at baseline. Current smokers were younger (mean age ± SD: 62 ± 9 vs. 69 ± 9 years) and leaner (mean body mass index (BMI): 28.9 & [plusmn] 3.2 vs. 31.3 ± 4.8 kg/m2) than men who were not current smokers. Adjusted for age, BMI and baseline cartilage scores, we found that men who were current smokers had an increased risk for cartilage loss, at the medial tibiofemoral joint (odds ratio (OR): 2.3, 95% CI: 1.0 to 5.4) and the patellofemoral joint (OR: 2.5, 95% CI: 1.1 to 5.7). Current smokers also had higher adjusted pain scores at baseline (60.5 vs. 45.0, p<0.05) and follow-up (59.4 vs. 44.3, p <0.05) compared with men who were not current smokers.
Ahem...could we get the Professor to translate this gobbledegook? Professor? Are you available? Right over here, sir...just stand in front of the blackboard and address the class. Here, you'll probably need this piece of chalk. There you are, sir...go right ahead now...
"Vat zees abstract sez iss dat schmokers vit ze arthritis of ze knee haff accelerated destruction of ze joint und more schmerz in das Kniegelenk as time goes by, dummkopfs!"
Testy, isn't he? He's right on the mark, though. Smokers with osteoarthritis suffer greater cartilage loss and more pain than nonsmokers with the same age, body mass and degree of joint damage.
That's right folks, just keep saying to yourself that the research is flawed, biased or totally false - and keep on smoking. By the time you look like this you wouldn't think of wearing shorts in the summer anyway, with or without die narbe.
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Smokers smoke because its addictive. I think you'll be hard-pressed to find one ex-smoker who gave up due to sarcasm or mockery.
My feeling is you can break any habit if you really want to. But perhaps I speak from ignorance - I never smoked. Anyway, when I visit the chemo room attached to the hospital here, I am still amazed that there are both hospital and chemo patients who roll their IV stands outside (even in winter) to smoke. I am sorry if I am offending anyone, but it seems to me that having gotten the wake up call of cancer, or whatever disease, that one would be WANT to quit - and do anything to make that possible. Personally, my ca dx is so grim, I only want to rant at all smokers, everywhere.
I doubt there more than a few smokers denying the health effects of smoking.
I have quit crank, coke, alchohol and cigarettes.
Cigarettes were the hardest.
From experience, yes you can break most any habit if you apply yourself to that goal. However in going these experiences it seems to me that the concept of mental and emotional discipline is just not part of our culture. Bad habits are to be cured not overcome, seems to me the greatest fallacy and then a 12 week program is time it takes then the issue is resolved.
I believe that we need a much greater emphasis on realistic self awareness, personal responsibility and educated, rational mental discipline to overcome what is really are not all that daunting of a problem. I suspect that the people where addiction presents itself as particular tenacious are very emotionally driven with limited impulse control.
As anyone familiar with this territory will say, you don't just drop a bad habit. You have to replace it with something. There's the rub. I smoked for 20 years and replaced it with meditation and participation in some social activities that didn't involve alcohol. So easy to say and so damned difficult to do.
EVERY smoker I've ever known was/is completely aware of the "badness" of the habit. Only some can a suitable replacement. If you don't understand why that is I suggest you study people a little more closely, beginning with yourself.
Side note: I once joined a research team working with three practicing MD's who were also on the faculty of a medical school, one was the school's dean. Major medical school in a large midwestern city. All three of these obgyn's smoked like chimneys.
My uncle is a retired doctor, who once told me that the insides of a smoker's lungs looks like they've been coated in black soot.
And he was smoking as he told me this. He can't go an hour without a cigarette. Quite the convergence of medical knowledge and addition.
I used to look down on people who were addicted to anything - cigarettes, drugs, alcohol. "Why don't they just stop?" I'd think to myself. Then I got addicted to Xanax, prescribed by a physician. I never took more than what was prescribed, but I still got dependent on it. Though I (that is, my conscience self) wanted desperately to stop using it, my brain cells thought otherwise; they wanted that substance or else. The 'or else' was a week of agitation and no sleep when I stopped taking Xanax, though I got through it. The worse week of my life. It was worse than recovering from ankle surgery.
I'll never look down on an addicted person again.
Yup. We can quit anytime. Why?
6 years ago shingles left me with seizures and vertigo-drop attacks. I can't drink 'cause I take 3200mg of Neurontin to control it. Then 2 years ago my wife was diagnosed with C2 Chordoma (go look it up). The Surgeons took the 2nd vertebra out of her neck (transmandibular approach) but the stroke they caused paralyzed her left side. I'll spend the rest of what's left of her life here at our home, while attendants and nurses have turned it into a hospital. Check www.caringbridge.com/visit/lynvotour to learn more about her struggle.
The only crutch I've got left is smoking cigs. So why quit? The world is filled with random nasty stuff that'll try and kill ya' anyway, so enjoy the time you've got.
Don't dare to assume till you've walked in these shoes.
I used to work for the Bone Marrow Transplant department associated with the Siteman Cancer Center at Barnes Hospital. There is a smoker's shelter just outside the building I worked in, and I saw patients and medical staff there every day. One day this poem popped out of me.
At the Hospital Smokers' Shelter
A white turban swathes her head
Where the hair used to tumble
Before the chemo started.
Her face is a round pale moon,
Tired, reddened eyes protruding
While she sucks so avidly
At that long tobacco tube.
Shes given up so much life
That she clings to this pleasure,
Fraught with poison and danger,
Glaring, wheelchair-bound, at us
If we dare to disapprove.
August 18, 2004
Kiwi Carlisle
Addiction is an interesting phenomenon--but I think we're blind to a lot of it, because we persist in regarding addiction as a moral/spiritual weakness, or a lack of willpower. Even AA, which has helped several people I know (re)claim their lives, talks about character "defects." What makes it so interesting, to me, is the combination of body and mind in the whole affair, and so much conversation tends toward one or the other of that, insisting on the duality.