After surgery, your body starts fixing damaged tissue right away, and good blood flow helps this healing happen faster. 

While many people think smoking only affects your lungs, it actually harms the body in many ways, making it much harder for your body to heal. 

Nicotine is found in cigarettes, cigars, pipes, vapes, e-cigarettes, chewing tobacco, snuff, patches and dip. No matter how nicotine enters your body, it causes problems. 

How Nicotine Hurts Blood Flow

More significantly, nicotine impacts the blood flow in your body. Blood flow is important because it carries oxygen and nutrients to your entire body, which allows it to constantly heal itself. Simply put, without good blood flow, your body won’t be able to repair itself after surgery. 

Blood flows through the body in small vessels called capillaries, and within those vessels are oxygen and nutrients needed for your skin, muscles, bones and organs. Nicotine causes those blood vessels to shrink smaller and tighter. This makes it harder, and sometimes impossible, for blood to reach different parts of your body, which slows or stops the healing process and increases your risk of developing an infection.

This looks different in every patient. For some, the effects of smoking cause pain, numbness, skin problems or even the need for more surgery. For others, restricted blood flow means that cuts, scrapes and surgical wounds heal more slowly. 

In patients with diabetes, it is especially dangerous because wounds may not heal at all. 

For example, in a patient who smokes and has spinal fusion surgery (a procedure to permanently connect two or more vertebrae to provide stability in the back), nicotine can block blood flow and stop the bones from growing together. 

Kick Nicotine to Kick Start Your Healing

If you can quit using tobacco at least six weeks before surgery, your body will have time to improve blood flow to support healing. As soon as you stop using nicotine, your blood vessels slowly start opening back up. As more oxygen reaches your body, your wounds heal faster and your risk of infection goes down.