Often in the course of a series of chelation treatments the question arises if a patient should be supported to continue with a habit of taking in certain toxins or rather, to make a conscious effort to abstain from indulging in them. There is no universally applicable answer to this quandary. It is not always wise to encourage or even insist on a patient to take a step he or she is not yet prepared to take. On the other hand, every driver knows what will happen to the manual transmission of his car when he shifts down a gear or two while hitting the accelerator! Something similar will happen to the body of those who add toxins to a system, which is undergoing a cleanse process.
Chelation is an intense treatment of detoxification, whereas smoking induces additional toxins into the body. This fact demonstrates that the two are mutually incompatible. They simply do not go together. The FAQ section on our www.healthyhealinggoa.com clearly spells out the facts: If a patient continues to smoke during a course of chelation therapy, the effects of the treatment are reduced by more than fifty percent.
A Few Words About Cigarettes
In 1994, major tobacco companies provided a list to the US government of 599 additives used in cigarettes. Some additives make the cigarette burn three to four times faster than pure tobacco. Some additives are put in to cause addiction to that particular brand, or to cigarette smoking in general. In addition, many harmful chemicals are actually produced from burning of the additives. These include ammonia, hydrogen cyanide carbon monoxide, tar etc, in other words highly poisonous gases. When inhaled in large amounts, they can cause instantaneous death. The reason being, that these gases quickly combine with and destroy the red blood cells (RBC) and their oxygen carrying capacity.
How Precisely Smoking & Chelation Are Incompatible
Coming back to our topic, let us investigate how smoking during the course of treatments adversely affects the results that one might be expecting.
1. Any smoker carries much higher levels of heavy metals in his or her system, especially Cadmium, Nickel, Arsenic and radioactive Polonium, when compared to non-smokers. Therefore, smokers in general go through more intense detoxification reactions when they start with their chelation treatments.
2. Smoking produces gases like carbon monoxide, ammonia and hydrogen cyanide. These gases combine irreversibly with the red blood cells and destroy their oxygen carrying capacity. These adverse side effects are at the peak shortly after smoking. When in such cases chelation therapy is given, the treatment instead of acting as a boon, taxes the body with further depletion of energy, resulting in all sorts of metabolic and chemical disturbances.
3. To make the point, let us consider the effects of smoking and chelation therapy on blood pressure. It has been proven that immediately after smoking, blood pressure shoots up sharply. These increases are temporary, but since most smokers smoke cigarettes several times a day, they occur often and may play a role in long-term problems. On the other hand, following a chelation therapy session, blood pressure decreases briefly. Now when a person smokes before or after a session of chelation, sudden increase in BP is followed by sudden drop, and once again up with another smoking session following the chelation, (which then could result in an even a higher increase than before). The net effect could be severe headaches lasting for more than 24 hours, as witnessed in a patient at Healthy Healing Center.
4. Smoking has now been clearly linked to kidney damage. This occurs partly because of the effects of toxic gases and chemicals, and partly as a result of arterial damage caused by blood pressure fluctuations. On the other hand, although chelation therapy has an overall beneficial effect on the kidneys, the heavy metal-chelator complexes are mainly excreted through them. In the presence of high amounts of toxic metals and compromised renal function, smoking and chelation therapy together carry the potential to increase the chances of developing toxic nephritis.
A Question of Priority
Therefore, even after taking several sessions of chelation therapy, a smoker who continues to smoke, will never be able to enjoy the full benefits of the treatment. He or she may actually experience more than average unpleasant cleansing reactions. This should be clearly pointed out before beginning with the chelation sessions so that people can make up their minds as to what they really want.