Allen Carr's Easyway to Stop Smoking - Allen Carr [41]
While I strongly support the right of everyone to have their own opinion, they are not entitled to their own facts. To argue that smoking doesn’t cause these diseases is stupid and dangerous. I also find it incredibly callous and disrespectful to the millions of smokers who have paid the ultimate price, to say nothing of their families left behind.
One needs only to see the mountain of cigarette butts outside the cancer wards of hospitals around the country to see the link between the two.
The statistical evidence in support of the dangers of smoking is so overwhelming as not to need further debate here. No one ever scientifically proved to me exactly why, when I bang my thumb with a hammer, it hurts. I soon got the message.
I must emphasize that I am not a doctor, but I didn’t need to be to know that my permanent cough, congestion, frequent asthma and bronchitis attacks were directly related to my smoking. This was confirmed to me in the strongest possible way when I quit smoking and all of the symptoms either disappeared or improved dramatically. You don’t need to be a doctor—or a rocket scientist—to know that smoking is bad for you. The only question in the smoker’s mind is whether they can survive it or whether it’ll kill them.
In my view, the most devastating damage the smoker experiences is to his immune system. Every species on the planet is under constant attack from germs, viruses, parasites, etc. The best defense we have is our immune system, which routinely protects us from these types of attacks. But how can our immune system function effectively when we are starving our body of the oxygen and nutrients it needs to thrive and survive? How can it work properly for you when it is under constant attack from the poisons contained in tobacco smoke? It’s bad enough that smoking causes so many life-threatening conditions, but what is worse is that it on top of this, it also works, like AIDS, to brutalize our immune system making us less able to fight off other diseases, infections and conditions.
Many of the adverse effects that smoking had on my health, some of which I had been suffering from for years, did not become apparent to me until many years after I had quit smoking.
While I was busy despising those idiots and cranks who would rather lose their legs than quit smoking, it didn’t even occur to me that I was already suffering from arteriosclerosis myself. I attributed my gray complexion to my natural coloring and an unhealthy aversion to exercise. I didn’t realize that it was due to the blocking up of my capillaries caused by smoking (incidentally along with smelling a lot nicer, a vastly improved complexion is one of the first things that people will notice about you when you quit, and it usually happens within a week or so). I had varicose veins in my thirties, which have disappeared since I stopped. About five years before I quit I began to have this weird sensation in my legs. It wasn’t a sharp pain, just a persistent, restless, slightly sore stiffness. I would get Joyce to massage my legs every night. About a year after I quit I realized that I hadn’t needed a massage since a few days after quitting.
About two years before I quit, I would occasionally get violent pains in my chest, which I feared must be lung cancer but now assume to have been angina. I haven’t had a single attack since I quit.
When I was a child I used to bleed profusely from cuts. This frightened me. No one explained to me that bleeding was a natural and necessary part of the healing process and that the blood would clot when it needed to. Later in life I would sustain quite deep cuts yet hardly bleed at all. This brown-red gunge would ooze from the cut.
The color worried me. I knew that blood was meant to be bright red and I assumed I had some sort of blood disease. However I was pleased about the consistency, because it meant I no longer bled so profusely. Not until I quit did I learn that smoking thickens the consistency of your blood and that the brownish color was due to the lack of oxygen. It didn’t particularly bother me