Can the body "heal" itself after many years off drugs?

[imgonnadieright?]

I am female, about mid-30s. For ten solid years I smoked cigarettes (half a pack or so daily), smoked weed (I don't know how much - I was high - almost daily), and did meth (smoked/snorted/swallowed, on and off for months at a time). It stopped being fun and I decided it was time to grow up, so I quit all at once and never looked back.

It has now been 10 years and some change since I quit that lifestyle. I am now in excellent health. I eat very well, exercise strenuously several days a week, have a low BMI, great blood pressure and solid blood work, get plenty of sleep, have a family and intellectual pursuits and so on.

I also have a lot of anxiety about how I ravaged my body over those 10 stupid years. I know I've probably greatly upped my cancer risk where it was originally quite low. Is it possible that quitting in my twenties and maintaining a healthy lifestyle ever since has allowed my body to heal? Or have the carcinogens and bad choices doomed me?

I understand this is likely a question without any real answer, but I was wondering if some of the more research-minded folks out there could offer any insight.

 

[S.J.B.]

There isn't enough data on cannabis or methamphetamine and their relation to longevity to make any kind of reasonable guess as to whether your past use is likely to increase the chance of premature death or serious illness. Tobacco, being legal and much more clearly linked to mortal illness than any other recreational drug in existence, has been more thoroughly studied on this front. This is from Johns Hopkins Medicine:

According to a 2013 study in the New England Journal of Medicine, quitting before the age of 40 reduces your chance of dying prematurely from a smoking-related disease by 90 percent, and quitting by age 54 still reduces your chance by two-thirds.

Even current smokers who quit after being diagnosed with cancer are better able to heal and respond to treatment, reducing the chance of death from some cancers by up to 40 percent.

If one were to take tobacco as a barometer, I would say that there's reason to be optimistic.

 

[sekio]

People can "heal" from all sorts of physical and environmental trauma. There have been people who've ingested radioactive plutonium, had bilateral amputations of arms/legs, lost sight or hearing, been hit in the forehead with a particle accelerator beam, had massive radiation doses, had an iron rod driven straight through their head, ingested all sorts of alkaloids or toxins, survived cancer, AIDS, etc. Hemingway, the author, had some stupid long list of maladies he lived through. Everything from malaria to stubbed toes.

Part of it is genetics, part of it is lifestyle, part of it is just the luck of the draw.

Smoking half a pack of cigs for 10 years is an insult to the body, sure, but nothing to lose sleep over.

 

[imgonnadieright?]

Thank you for your input. Honestly, it's really not the cigs I'm worried about, nor even the weed, really (despite smoking a looooot of it). It's the damn meth. When I was on, I was on, and I put a ton of that shit into my body. Where it came from, what was in it -- I have no idea. That's what freaks me out.

 

[mb-909]

Thank you for your input. Honestly, it's really not the cigs I'm worried about, nor even the weed, really (despite smoking a looooot of it). It's the damn meth. When I was on, I was on, and I put a ton of that shit into my body. Where it came from, what was in it -- I have no idea. That's what freaks me out.

First, the brain is pretty resilent and secondly can recover through neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity is the life long process of brain structure changes mostly resulting from learning experiences. Typical the total quantity of brain mass is not as important for functioning as the structure connecting the different brain areas - not talking about a "bullet to the head" cases.

An Example: Imagine somebody, we call him life in this context, mixing and kneading different colours of play doh. The play doh symbolizes your brain and the colours the different brain areas. Over time some of the play doh will be lost resulting in tiny holes. The kneading flattens out the holes resulting in a functioning structure. Depending on everybodies individual life style the amount of holes to cover up and the speed of the kneading will vary. If life stays put and does not actively pursuit in living and learning the kneading will just slowly progress. On the flip side being open to living will increase the progress.

I don't think that you have damaged your brain in a way, which isn't recoverable. Regarding your post: Can you change something, which already happened? Does thinking about it change anything? Nope. Even if you know what you took it doesn't change anything. On a positive note: From reading between the lines I guess you came to the conclusion, that you don't want to take substances anymore you don't know the origin of - golden learning experience.

Overthinking will let you slowly drift in a cycle of anxious behaviour, which will lead to less living, less change and in the end a slower recovery. But you are not alone. There are tons of people like myself dealing with similar problems. Let your self be hugged. Life is shitty sometimes, but often the hard times result in changes, which will be benefitting in the future. Life is not meant to be easy but a journey with ups and downs.

 

[Limpet_Chicken]

To be fair, sekio, Phineas Gage cannot be said to have 'recovered'.

He didn't die. There is a difference. But what was left of him, psychologically and mentally speaking, was not the same person as had the metal bar driven through his skull. It wasn't much of a whole intact human being at all, from everything I've read.

Heard about the guy that got blasted in the forehead with a high energy proton beam from that synchrotron.....damn. (Well, high energy when considering it's hitting some poor bugger in the damn face, instead of investigating the frontiers of physics) That's pretty astonishing, even when you consider how tightly confined the beamlines in equipment like that keep the stream. That he got away with quite so little damage. Makes one wonder just how much point there'll be, when power supplies allow for it, in particle beam weaponry.

I think it pretty shitty of his government and medical system not to grant him free treatment for his seizures though. That's fucking low. When he's not only served his country in the noblest possible way, alongside medicine, but paid a far higher price for it than almost any physicist, bar individuals like Marie Curie (I'm not counting Pierre as having paid a price for his aiding her, although he undoubtedly would have done had he not instead, been run over and killed). Just because it was all about the pure pursuit of knowledge, instead of researching more effective ways to slaughter people en masse....if he had done that, or if he'd been sent off to some frozen shithole or parasite-infested fetid jungle putting bullets in his ruler's enemies, then he would have. But for furthering the knowledge of the world in our understanding of subatomic physics?

Sorry, piss off, that isn't good enough, yeah, you got shot in the face with a high energy proton beam? well that's too bad. Next patient please!

 

[Save]

I guess as a vegan I should say I can only say everything bad can be made good through a plant-based diet but that would piss people off as it does not offer a detailed explanation but is that so bad?

And as sekio pointed out, people are wildly different in their ability to heal from horrible phenomenon and some smokers live well until old age without any adverse reactions to their health (seemingly). So I want to just blurt out karma.

 

[sekio]

He didn't die. There is a difference. But what was left of him, psychologically and mentally speaking, was not the same person as had the metal bar driven through his skull. It wasn't much of a whole intact human being at all, from everything I've read.

From what I understand, because Gage didn't exactly have lots of records of his behaviour prior to the accident, it's up in the air to what extent he was effected and for how long. Apparently he did manage to work as a taxi driver in South America in his later years (and was much more stable in general), so it's plausible he did recover to some extent.

 

[polymath]

People can "heal" from all sorts of physical and environmental trauma. There have been people who've ingested radioactive plutonium, had bilateral amputations of arms/legs, lost sight or hearing, been hit in the forehead with a particle accelerator beam, had massive radiation doses, had an iron rod driven straight through their head, ingested all sorts of alkaloids or toxins, survived cancer, AIDS, etc. Hemingway, the author, had some stupid long list of maladies he lived through. Everything from malaria to stubbed toes.

Part of it is genetics, part of it is lifestyle, part of it is just the luck of the draw.

Smoking half a pack of cigs for 10 years is an insult to the body, sure, but nothing to lose sleep over.

It's interesting how that guy who got a high-energy proton beam on his face experienced it as a "flash of light"... Apparently the retina can be stimulated by that kind of radiation too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adequate_stimulus

Doing the same with present-day TeV-scale accelerators is not recommended.

 

[Limpet_Chicken]

I have read an account of Gage's accident and what became of him, didn't know he ended up working as a cab driver, but apparently he underwent massive personality changes, becoming 'fitful, irreverent, prone to irrational outbursts' and becoming enraged inappropriately. Sounded like he got pretty badly messed up afterwards, and AFAIK never completely recovered.

As for the proton beam and flashes of light, I seem to recall that astronauts have reported sudden flashes and similar visual phenomena, which IIRC, have been said to be directionally perceived, from high energy particle tracks formed within the eye after the strike of high energy particles, and that one problem they had in some cases was sleeping, because closing their eyes didn't make any difference, and that at least on some missions, astronauts took to sleeping in the most heavily shielded areas of the craft where sensitive electronics had to be protected, in an effort to lessen the disturbance resulting from the energetic protons, etc.

 

[polymath]

In space there are particles with a far greater kinetic energy than what could be achieved with any accelerator, as this example shows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh-My-God_particle

However, they are not found very densely so detecting them requires a lot of waiting. Some of them are found to have energies that shouldn't even be physically possible because collisions with cosmic background radiation photons should destroy them before detection, and I think this hasn't yet been explained.