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As more people are trying to quit smoking, a lot of them have taken up vaping. While the safety of electronic cigarettes has long been debated, health experts still say they are 95 percent less harmful than tobacco cigarettes.
This is why the National Health Service (NHS) might soon start prescribing the e-cigarette to people who want to quit smoking.
Even if a recent study aimed to prove that vaping might lead to smoking tobacco, especially among teenagers, experts say there is no evidence to support this theory yet, so it is safe to say that the e-cigarette might be your passport into a healthier lifestyle.
Some authorities, including the Welsh government, are even planning to start allowing the use of e-cigarettes in public spaces. In spite of all this enthusiasm, the British Medical Association said that it is important to be cautious regarding the excessive use of these devices.
According to various authorities, even if electronic cigarettes are much safer than tobacco, they are not 100 percent risk-free.
It was estimated that about 2.6 million people in Great Britain are now vapers. This is good news because it means a lot of people are either trying to quit smoking or they have already done it.
“At the moment, 80,000 people [in England] die every year as a result of cigarette smoking. If everybody who was smoking switched to e-cigarettes that would reduce to about 4,000 deaths a year. That’s the best estimate at the moment. It may well be much, much lower than that.,” said co-author of the report, Professor Ann McNeil, with King’s College in London, who believes the use of e-cigarettes might prove to be a “game changer” regarding public health.
At the moment it is not yet possible to prescribe e-cigarettes to smokers because they do not have a license for medical purposes. This is why people are still being encouraged to seek help from local services to get more information and the right tools to aid them in their struggle with the addiction.
Health professional are encouraged to discuss the possibility of using e-cigarettes especially with the patients who are heavy smokers.
“If I was running a stop-smoking service, I would encourage people who are interested in trying e-cigarettes to have a go. I would also be recommending all the other evidence-based medications that people can use,” said McNeill.
It is also important to help these people realize that their fears regarding the safety of these devices are largely unfounded because normal cigarettes expose them to a much higher risk of getting ill. Thus, even if e-cigarettes are not totally harmless, they are a much healthier option.
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