I will never forget the patients I treated who had thromboangiitis obliterans, also known as Buerger s Disease. These are people whose allergic reaction to cigarettes causes their blood vessels to become inflamed and clot. This causes their fingers and toes to auto-amputate. If you stop smoking, the disease stops. Yet the smoking addiction is so strong that very few can stop.
Smoking is associated with cancers of the mouth, esophagus, pancreas, cervix, kidney, and bladder.
It is a major cause of heart attacks, strokes and other vascular disease. Worse, the rate of youth smoking has actually increased. Not surprisingly, smokers incur higher health costs because of the serious illnesses associated with tobacco use. This led several states, including Iowa, to sue the tobacco industry to recoup the increased Medicaid expenditures due to tobacco use. For a variety of reasons including the tobacco industry s apparent culpability in encouraging underage smoking, the industry agreed to settle with the forty states that had filed suit.