Can Smoking Help Cardiac Arrhythmia?

This is Tanya’s personal story, in her own words.

There have been a number of times when doctors have been proven to be wrong: could this be another case of doctors saying what they are told to say by the powers that be?

After giving up smoking I was admitted to hospital with a cardiac arrhythmia, known as atrial fibrillations. On my doctor’s advice and through fear I decided not to start smoking again in case it made my heart worse. However after getting lots of strange beats I thought ‘Well, I like a smoke and my heart’s gammy anyway, so I may as well smoke.’ So I started again.

After taking up smoking again I found my heart condition actually improved. Amazed by this, I decided to ask around in my online cardiac support group for people with hearts just like mine just how many were smokers and ex smokers. One lady emailed me in response to say she smoked around 5 a day and it helped her heart (not to have so many freaky beats). Another woman emailed to say since giving up smoking, her arrhythmia had started up again. The best case was that of a man in the group (he has the worst heart out of all of us on the site, regularly suffering from a number of arrhythmias) who said his condition got much worse after he decided to stop smoking.

The cardiac support site is not the only place I have found people like this: there are my neighbours, one an ex-smoker while the other had given up for a little while. He has asthma, yet when he gave up his wife was very concerned that she may lose him. His asthma got very bad; he had a cough he couldn’t get rid of; he had symptoms of vagus nerve damage, and he also had a number of days off work and that is not like him. After a while he decided, as I did, that maybe smoking wasn’t such a bad idea. He now smokes again and while he is smoking he has very few – almost no – issues. His wife gave up smoking many years ago and since giving up her health has become very much worse, leaving her with more health complaints than it’s possible to list here. Her main complaint though is fibromyalgia.

These conditions suffered by all the people above are cases where the symptoms can be traced back to the vagus nerve. This nerve controls involuntary organ function and motor function such as heart rate, swallowing, breathing and digestive functions.

For those where the vagus nerve is damaged or inflamed, smoking could actually be more beneficial. The vagus nerve can be damaged in many ways: scar tissue caused by injury or other problems, direct damage or even a very nasty ear nose or throat infection can cause the vagus nerve to become inflamed or damaged. It can also be damaged at birth and the person will not know about it until after many wrong diagnoses and treatment of individual conditions. Sometimes they never get a correct diagnosis.

Nicotine acts as a natural anti inflammatory, and this anti-inflammatory effect could be what is stopping arrhythmia patients, asthma patients and fibromyalgia patients among many others, including gastric patients, getting worse. Fibromyalgia, arrhythmia, asthma and even depression can be traced as symptoms of vagus nerve damage. Stimulating this nerve or helping it become less inflamed by smoking could help reduce the symptoms of the conditions and in some cases almost rid the person of the symptoms better than prescription medications.

It’s my theory that doctors are misdiagnosing people as it’s easier to push a pill at someone, give them a nice diagnosis for what they have and keep them dependent on the system for their drugs etc. When for many, simply a nerve has been damaged, and this is easy to treat in a few ways but the government would rather have us more dependent on the system. This is shown by the amount of money they are injecting into stopping people smoking: after all we are losing millions in tax revenue stopping people smoking and the NHS is paying out more millions on drugs to stop you smoking.

I ask you why the government don’t seem to care about your health, and for the few patients that get sick from smoking the bill must be a lot less than that of losing billions to stop a few people getting sick: they appear to want us hooked on drugs we will keep having to pay for!