Physiotherapists often spend more time 1-on-1 with patients than any other member of the health care team. Conversations might start with purely clinical things, but often progress to talking about life in general and various ways of keeping healthy. One of the common questions that patients ask is about smoking… specifically, how soon after the surgical procedure can they get up out of bed to go and smoke again. Oddly enough, while everyone knows smoking is not the best health decision you can make generally, after an operation it is quite helpful to mobilise up out of bed as soon as it is safe and appropriate to do so – and smokers are quite motivated in this regard!
The best way to think about smoking is to have some basic info so you can make an informed decision. I thought it might be interesting to share some information about smoking in and around the period of your operation.
Smoking affects your body’s healing rate
- In a large study looking at broken ankles and healing rates, smokers had 10% higher rates of postoperative complications than did non-smokers, and were at 5x greater risk of developing deep wound infection, and 6x greater risk of all types of infection.
- In a study on broken legs, smokers have a 30% higher risk of the bones not healing together (non-union).
- The problems come because smoking reduces blood flow in all your tissues, including the immune system, the muscles, lung and bones.
- This is not just around the time of operation. Studies show that your bones are affected long before you might break a bone. On average, the hip bones of smokers is lower than that of non-smokers, and this means that the average age of fractures in smokers is a full 9 years younger than that of non-smokers.
- The implication here is that you should quit as soon as possible. Take this opportunity of the surgery to quit.
Your physio will do everything they can to help you be more healthy
- We will encourage you to move more, get stronger, and engage in other healthy life-style choices, including advising you to quit smoking.
- However, just advising you to do this is only helpful for 1-3% of people; smoking is quite addictive and hard to quit – the rest might need help from their doctors as well. Please ask your doctor how they can help you quit.
If you decide to continue smoking, please try to reduce the amount you smoke, and exercise more to help offset the negative effects of smoking on your healing rate.
You can read more info about the effects of smoking on health here: