It is less than a month until the annual “No Smoking Day” which is held on Wednesday 14th of March this year. As we all know, smoking is severely detrimental to our health and the No Smoking Day charity promotes the quitting of smoking and provides tonnes of support in aid of this.
The charity helps hundreds of thousands of people attempt to quit smoking every year by supporting local organisations such as GP surgeries, schools and employers to host their own campaigns and events to promote the quitting of smoking. No smoking day has directly helped a quarter of a million people quit smoking and is generally hugely successful.
10 shocking facts about smoking/
- On average, smoking costs the NHS between £2.7bn and £5.2bn a year in the UK.
- If you were to die from a smoking related condition, it is unlikely to be quick or painless. For example, if you develop COPD, which is a respiratory illness, you can expect several years of extreme coughing, breathing difficulties and other distressing symptoms before you die.
- Cigarette smoke contains over 4,000 chemicals, 50 of which are known to cause cancer, and other poisons.
- Smoking in pregnancy increases the risk of miscarriage and pregnancy congenital defects in the baby, e.g. cleft palate.
- Smokers are a third more likely to have a stillbirth or have their baby die of cot death within the first week of life.
- Hospitals expect around 17,000 children a year under five years old in England and Wales to be admitted due to illnesses caused by passive smoking.
- Approximately 10 million cigarettes are purchased every single minute and around 15 billion cigarettes are sold in a single day.
- Ambergris, otherwise known as whale vomit is possibly one of the many additives used to make cigarettes!
- Every 8 seconds, a person dies across the world due to a smoking related illness.
- Urea, which is a chemical compound that is massively present in urine, is used to flavour cigarettes!
How we can help our patients quit smoking?
We can work with the rest of the dental team to help increase awareness of the dangers of smoking when patients attend their appointments. Ways this can be done are by verbally explaining to patients in the surgery how smoking is affecting their oral health, and also their overall health. We can also provide them with literature and contact details of groups that can help them. Leaflets and literature can also be available to read and take away in reception for patients who are a bit more reserved and would rather not talk to us about their habit.
We can attend smoking cessation courses which will allow us directly to help and advise smokers on quitting. Many are available and there are also online courses.