13. Question: What is the main harm of smoking to health?

A lot has been said and written about the dangers of smoking. As a doctor, I will only remind you that tobacco contains about thirty substances that are harmful to health. The most dangerous of them is the nicotine alkaloid.

Among smokers, there are especially many patients with bronchopulmonary diseases. And, perhaps, the most formidable consequence of smoking is lung cancer. The fact is that tobacco smoke contains carcinogens (substances that cause cancer). These are, for example, benzopyrene and its derivatives. There are a lot of smokers. Among them are all age categories: from children to the elderly. Boys and girls smoke, women smoke, even some pregnant women smoke...

In Moscow, according to the study, the age of initiation to smoking has decreased to 10 years for boys and to 12 years for girls. A deplorable reality.

It must be said that smoking has a particularly detrimental effect on the child's body. Among other things, a teenager forms a complex of neuropsychic deviations. Attention, memory, sleep suffer, mood "jumps".

Smokers develop nicotine syndrome. It is the same addiction as alcohol and drugs, only less damaging to health. Although it depends on how to say. After all, lung cancer is not an argument in favor of the harmlessness (according to some) of this addiction.

By the way, it should be mentioned that according to the new classification of diseases, which came into force in 1999, tobacco addiction is officially recognized as an ailment. And we will add – sinful. Since smoking is self-indulgence, it is a form of self-gratification. It is rightly said that smoking is incense for demons.