Obviously, not all breathing problems can be prevented. Once breathing problems start, preventing future difficulties is often a lot easier then dealing with an acute crisis. When I think about prevention, two things immediately come to mind, genetics, and environment. Let’s tackle them one at a time, and point out places where intervening, even now, could help your lung function.
Could it be that one is destined to have lung problems because of their family tree? Genetics are inescapable, but not uncontrollable. There is still a lot that the medical world has to learn about what turns genes on and what turns genes off. For example, what if you have “the genes” to get emphysema if you smoke? There are multiple possible outcomes to this scenario.
- You never smoke. You never get emphysema.
- You never smoke. You get emphysema.
- You smoke. You get emphysema.
- You smoke. You never get emphysema.
What happened? There is one truth I know. There are lots of smokers who get emphysema, and there are lots of smokers who never get emphysema. How can you get a smoker’s disease without smoking? Easy, there are other causes, such as lung enzyme repair deficiencies, second-hand exposure, radon (which by the way is a perfectly natural form of radiation all over the planet) and pollution. The same can be said for lung cancer. To think that smoking alone causes lung disease is naive. The lesson here is that there is a lot more, besides smoking, which causes emphysema. But let’s be honest, the smoking didn’t help.
I often see patients who tell me that their family is angry with them for smoking because it has ruined their health. While this is true, it is regrettable. People continue to smoke because it is a habit, and they are addicted. People should be encouraged to have good habits and give up bad habits; because it makes them less likely to have disease. I strongly feel that people do not get “deserved diseases.” Let’s face it, lots of people do everything that is bad for their health and get away with it. There are also plenty of people who do everything right and drop dead jogging and eating tofu. If you are going to blame a smoker for their illness, you might as well blame anyone who has eaten any fried food for their first heart attack. People like to point fingers, as long as it is not pointed inward at themselves. What should be avoided, is having people at high risk doing things that increase their risk for disease. Continuing to smoke, is a bad idea. With smoking cessation, there can be some improvement. Remember, it’s not like damage to a house or a car, this is living tissue. When a car is damaged, it stays damaged. You need new parts to fix it. With the lung, the tissue can do one of two things, scar (remain damaged) or repair (we call it healing). If there is scar tissue, we have not yet found a way to fix it, although we are getting closer. However, some tissue can heal, assuming that we don’t keep inflicting injury upon it. Let’s talk about that.