Everyone knows that smoking kills. And no matter how much evidence doctors and scientists share with the public, some people refuse to quit smoking. However, the images you’re about to see here may scare you out of smoking if you hope to live a long and healthy life. As you’re about to see, surgeons are showing off the lungs of a chain smoker who died from smoking at the tender of age fifty-two – and would have lived much, much longer if they had given up cigarettes.
While you might have seen images of tar-blackened lungs before, these will scare the living daylights out of you if you’re a smoker yourself. These lungs, which were removed from a dead chain smoker who smoked cigarettes for thirty years, reveal the horrific results that smoking tobacco can have on your body.
Lungs are supposed to be pink in color. But this chain smoker turned their lungs black because of the decades of tobacco smoke they inhaled into their body. Cigarette after cigarette clogged up their lungs and turned the healthy lung tissue into a cancerous mess.
The man, who these lungs used to belong to, died at the age of fifty-two of multiple lung conditions. The lungs were extracted from the chain smoker’s body by surgeons from the Wuxi People’s Hospital in Jiangsu in China. The video of the man’s lungs has gone viral online as people are horrified that this was the result of three decades of smoking. The clip has received more than 25 million views on social media and has been called the “best anti-smoking ad ever.”
The hospital uploaded the video of the dead man’s lungs along with the caption, “Do you still have the courage to smoke?”
While this caption seems to goad smokers to laugh in the face of death and keep the habit going strong, the doctors want people to rethink smoking as a lifestyle choice because it’s really just a death sentence.
Dr. Chen, the lung transplant surgeon, led the operation. He also serves as the vice president of the hospital.
“The patient didn’t undergo a C.T. scan before his death. He was declared brain dead, and his lungs were donated shortly after that. Initial oxygenation index tests were okay, but when we harvested the organs, we realized we wouldn’t be able to use them. We Chinese love smoking. It would be impractical to say that we wouldn’t accept the lungs of all smokers, but there are strict standards.”
Dr. Chen added, “(We accept) lungs from people under sixty years of age who have only recently died, minor infections in the lungs and relatively clean X-rays are also acceptable. If the above conditions are met, we would consider transplanting the lungs.”
However, this man’s lungs were so far gone that the doctors had no hope of using the organ in a transplant. Because this is what can happen to the human body from cigarette smoke, it is important to quit smoking as early as possible.
Nicotine replacement therapy may help.