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it was for a checkup because i had spine surgery a while ago and i remember about 2 years ago after the surgery one of the doctors told me that smoking cigarettes is really bad for my spine dont ever do it i thought it was a scare tactic and today a different dude said the same thing...so somehow cigarrette smoking affects the disks in your spine so i was wondering what about weed? :wtf:
You'd better ask the doctor. With something as serious as a spinal surgery, it would be foolhardy to rely on any advice from a non-professional.
It's because cigarette smoking impairs vascular heath, Wonka. The health of the spinal column, disks, and supporting vertebrae all depend very heavily on the veins and arteries that supply those structures. Smoking increases the risk of arteriosclerosis, or plaque occlusion in the arteries that supply your spinal/back anatomy. It also irritates and inflames your arteries, which causes them to be less efficient. And it decreases your body's ability to heal, too, by slowing, or sometimes downright preventing, healing since it impairs the ability of your smallest veins and arteries, your capillaries, to knit together and do their job of enabling the diffusion of water, oxygen, lipids into your bloodstream and filtering carbon monoxide, urea and other waste products back out. Smoking is also a desiccant, so it deprives your vascular system, tissues and disks of necessary fluid. The chemical nicotine is a vaso-constrictor, which means it causes your veins and arteries and capillaries to tighten up and shrink back rather than to relax, open up and branch out (and consequently heal and supply the tissues efficiently).
Do a Google search on "smoking back pain" and you'll find more information than you could ever want to read. The bottom line is that cigarette smokers have more back pain than non-smokers and end up having more back surgeries as a result.
My theory is that cigarette smoking is much more damaging than cannabis smoking, but cannabis smoking still has some drawbacks. THC alone is clearly a wonderful vascular anti-inflammatory and vaso-dilator, but in smoked form you're also getting all the byproducts of combustion in addition to the THC, and those byproducts are vascular irritants and desiccants in the same way that cigarette smoking is. So whole smoked cannabis, because of the crap that comes along with the beneficial ingredients, is probably not great for vascular or back health just as it's not good for heart or pulmonary health. Vaped or eaten cannabis is likely a more health-friendly way to consume it.