What Are Common Nicotine Cancer Symptoms?
- Weight loss or gain without intention or obvious cause
- A sore that does not heal
- Persistent Hoarseness or a cough that refuses to abate
- Difficulty swallowing
- A thickening or lump in any part of the body
- Coughing up blood
- Unusual bleeding or discharge
- Feeling weak or constantly tired and you are not pregnant
- Discomfort after eating
- Changes in bowel or bladder habits and stool colour
How Does Smoking Cause Cancer?
Known toxins and poisons, added to tobacco in manufactured cigarettes, often referred to in slang as ‘tailor-made cancer sticks,’ corrupt and deform healthy cells. The corrupted cells form a cancer and then spread to invade and infect surrounding healthy tissue.
To add insult to injury, the body stops your immune system from finding and killing off the cancerous cells. With nothing to stop the cancer from spreading, it grows and can move around the body, infecting many organs and any tissue in its path. Some cancers can be extremely aggressive and spread like wildfire, quickly reaching stage three before the person becomes aware they are not well and need to seek treatment, by which time, in some cases, it can be too late to prevent the coming death.
Poisons in nicotine smoke can corrupt a cell’s DNA coding. DNA is the cell’s instruction manual for controlling a cell’s normal growth and function. When DNA is damaged, the cell can degenerate and deform, creating a cancerous tumour.
What Is The Difference Between Tobacco And Nicotine?
Tobacco is made by drying leaves from tobacco plants.
Nicotine is the main chemical found in the tobacco leaf.
Nicotine is considered to be a highly addictive substance to the majority of smokers; however, there is debate about how addictive it really is and how much of an addiction to smoking is psychological, not nicotine dependent.
Research has shown that nicotine is only active in the system for 42 hours. Once a smoker has stopped smoking for 42 hours, the craving for nicotine is debated as chemically dependent in nature, given there is no nicotine in the body. The theory is that a large part of smoking is psychological and based on the fact the culture of smoking was ingrained into the person’s hourly routine and psyche.
Therefore, it is not a dependence upon nicotine that prevents smokers from quitting, but the inability to cease the association that went with lighting a cigarette. For example, most smokers will be drinkers. When they have a beer or a coffee, they will automatically light up a cigarette and smoke it, even if there is no craving for the nicotine that prompts them to light the smoke. The two items just go together, and when one is missing, the brain unconsciously links the two, and you consciously react by adding the missing item.
Seeing other people smoking, even in a movie, will see a smoker reach into the packet and light up a cigarette, even if they just finished one, despite there being no craving or need for the cigarette when questioned.
Studies are ongoing, but experiments suggest that the success of quitting a smoking habit for good largely relies on retraining the brain and the person to become conscious of their association with situations and people who trigger them to light up and smoke.
Some people have exceptional willpower and can go cold turkey, never looking back or relapsing. Others are psychologically prone to peer pressure and are easily led astray, seeing them relapse back into a smoking habit after having quit for several weeks or months.
In the majority of cases, smokers will require more than one attempt at quitting before they achieve success, with each relapse having a shorter period and the time between them getting longer.
To sum up the research in a sentence, when you quit smoking, you are not addicted to nicotine; you are addicted to having something to do with your hands in social situations that reduces your anxiety and conforms to the social norms around you. Once the brain stops associating an action with needing a cigarette, then the habit will be completely kicked with ease, with not one craving for nicotine to be had.
Why Do People Keep Smoking If It Causes Cancer?
There no one definitive reason for a person to take up smoking. Decades have passed since the whistleblower exposed the tobacco industry’s dirty secrets. Despite the known and constantly advertised dangers of smoking, 9 out of 10 lung cancer deaths are caused by people who actively choose to smoke cigarettes or by forced second-hand smoke exposure in the case of people sharing a house with a smoker, particularly in susceptible young children.
A greater risk of developing lung cancer exists today than in 1964, despite people smoking fewer manufactured cigarettes. One reason is the way manufacturers produce ready-to-smoke cigarettes and the long list of carcinogenic and known toxic poisons they contain. One can argue that it is not the nicotine but the other additives that cause the cancers. Either way, choosing not to smoke in the first place is the best preventative measure to undertake. Educating young children starting in preschool is the second best way to see a reduction in the number of teenagers who take up the practice and form a habit.
Government taxes on cigarettes are astronomical and the cost is toted to be preventative to enabling children and teenagers to start smoking. Unfortunately, while in theory it should work, smoking has become a ‘rich man’s’ vice. The astronomical cost of a packet of cigarettes in Australia has led to a huge black market imported from the Middle East and Asia that targets the lower socioeconomic sector. Families with smokers will forego food and medicine to support and maintain their smoking habit.
12 Types Of Nicotine Cancer Caused By Smoking
Nicotine cancer caused by smoking can appear anywhere in the body, but commonly acquired cancers caused by smoking manufactured cigarettes include:
- Blood (acute myeloid leukemia)
- Bladder
- Cervix
- Colon and rectum
- Oesophagus
- Kidney and renal pelvis
- Larynx
- Liver
- Lungs, trachea, and bronchus
- Mouth and throat
- Pancreas
- Stomach
Smokeless tobacco and dried tobacco leaves that have not been treated with chemicals, such as chewing tobacco and Shisha smoking, also cause nicotine cancer, predominantly including cancers of the:
How Is Nicotine Cancer Treated?
The treatment for nicotine cancer depends on the type of cancer diagnosed and the stage of the disease. The stage is determined by how severe the cancer is if it has spread to other parts of the body, and how many organs have been affected.
When formulating a treatment plan, the oncologist will consider the patient’s age, type of cancer, stage of cancer, and general health. In most people, the goal of treatment is to cure the cancer completely or put it into remission.
In other cases where the diagnosis is stage four, and a cure or remission is not possible, the goal is to control the disease or to reduce and relieve the painful symptoms for as long as possible with palliative care while nature runs her course. The treatment plan may change several times as the cancer is cured, goes into remission, or is diagnosed as palliative in nature.
Most treatment plans include surgery, radiation therapy, or chemotherapy. Other plans involve biological therapy, which is a bone marrow or stem cell treatment that helps your immune system fight cancer.
Some nicotine cancers respond best to a single type of treatment. Other cancers may respond best to a combination of treatments.
In patients requiring very high doses of chemotherapy or radiation therapy, a stem cell transplant, also known as a bone marrow transplant, may be recommended by their oncologist.
High-dose chemical and radiation therapies destroy both cancer cells and normal healthy blood cells. A stem cell transplant can help the body to make healthy blood cells to replace the corrupted cancer cells. It is a complicated and painful procedure with many side effects and risks.
What Is An Ostomy?
An ostomy, or stoma, is a surgical opening made to the large intestine that allows waste to be eliminated from the body through the abdomen, where it is collected in a disposable bag. An ostomy can be temporary or permanent.
Temporary ostomies are used while the affected area of the body heals.
Permanent ostomies are used when cancer has resulted in the removal of the entire colon or the end of it.
The Definitive List Of All Recognised Cancers
There are too many to list here, so check out Cancer.Gov’s, it will give you an alphabetised list of every known cancer currently recognised and treated in 2022.
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