NHS HIGHLAND: It’s disheartening to see people smoking outside hospitals
I have just been looking at a scientific paper from 70 years ago. Medicine and science have changed considerably since then.
The structure of DNA had only just been discovered, and the first satellite had not yet been launched into space. Now we rely of genetic information for tackling disease and crime and for investigating our ancestry, while a vast array of satellites is essential for communication and navigation.
The importance of the internet and smart phones to the lives of most of us would have been almost impossible to imagine in the 1950s. The paper I was considering has some differences for those published today and even contains hand-drawn graphs, but the message contained in it is just as important today as it was in 1954. It was an early demonstration of the links between smoking and serious diseases such as lung cancer and coronary heart disease.
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The harms from tobacco had been strongly suspected before the scientific paper was written, but this and subsequent research demonstrated beyond doubt that smoking is a major cause of premature death and serious illness. Since smoking is addictive and since people have made a lot of money from selling tobacco, the change in smoking habits has been slow.
Simply having the information about the risks from smoking is just not enough to change what for many has been the habit of a lifetime. We may consider evidence to be abstract and uncertain, but this can change when we see our friends, family or ourselves affected. Other ways to reduce smoking have been needed to improve our health too, such as taxes on tobacco and laws on smoke-free environments.
Smoking remains one of the most important public health issues worldwide and still has a huge impact locally. The effects are not just on those who smoke themselves but on people around who inhale the smoke. It is especially disheartening to see people smoking outside hospitals or clinic buildings, both because of the ill effects on the smokers and on those around them.
The good news is that there are effective ways to quit smoking which will improve people’s health and give them more money in their pockets when they don’t buy cigarettes anymore. Stop smoking services have been going for many years now but are still here and are designed to understand and help smokers who are looking to quit. For people going into hospital there are services to help them quit and to resist the cravings with nicotine replacement therapy.
Some of the risks from smoking may take many years to reduce but other health benefits happen almost immediately, including risks from heart disease. So we may have heard the messages about smoking before, they may come originally from scientific papers a long time ago, but we can still make the changes and improve our health.
Dr Tim Allison is NHS Highland’s director of public health and policy.