Hurray for the Smoking Bans!
November 7th, 2009 | by admin |Good news for anyone aiming for better health. According to a report, issued by the Institute of Medicine, the smoking bans in restaurants, offices, and other public buildings has been show to reduce cases of heart attacks and heart disease. As a chiropractor, I always try to get my patients to stop smoking. Some do, some don’t. So, when the laws to ban smoking went into effect, I was tremendously happy for my patients who’d stopped smoking and my patients who didn’t smoke at all, but worked in restaurants and other places where they were forced to inhale secondhand smoke.
The report concluded that exposure to secondhand smoke significantly increased the risk of having a heart attack among both smokers and nonsmokers. The federally commissioned panel also said it found that a reduction in heart problems began to take effect fairly quickly after a smoking ban was instituted and that exposure to low or fleeting levels of secondhand smoke could cause cardiovascular problems. “Even a small amount of exposure to secondhand smoke can cause an increase in blood clotting, constrict blood vessels, and cause a heart attack,” said Dr. Neal L. Benowitz, a professor of medicine, psychiatry, and biopharmaceutical sciences at the University of California, San Francisco, and a member of the panel. “For places in the country that don’t have smoking bans,” Dr. Benowitz added, “smoking bans need to be put in place as quickly as possible. The longer we wait, the more disease we are accepting.”
For more about this report, commissioned by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, go to nytimes.com