There are many types of Nicotine Replacement Therapy on Products on the market today. Nicotine patches, nicotine gum, and even lozenges are the popular trends these days. Do they cure smoking? Or do they substitute one type of nicotine addiction for another?
Find out more by reading my observations below.
Since I first wrote about the PATH (Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health) study (https://www.nicotinemonkey.com/up-the-garden-path-to-reduce-tobacco-related-death-and-disease/) how far along have our intrepid researchers got? They now proceed, we are informed, not in steps or stages, but in waves. We’re now at Waves 1 – 3 with a paper released in March 2020 by Saul Shiffman and Mark Sembower. These [...]
What does the name New Nicotine Alliance (NNA) mean to you? The word ‘new’ here is ambiguous. Is the organisation one that supersedes a previous nicotine alliance, or is it new in the sense that a pair of trousers is new when you buy it but after having been worn for a while can no longer be so [...]
An organisation called Yorkshire Cancer Research has put out a video entitled Vape to Quit. This video, though well meant, shows everything that’s wrong with the current approach to quitting smoking. I’ll transcribe some of the speech and add my comments. Why do you need a 'way' to stop doing something? ‘There’s (sic) various ways stop’ says Paul [...]
Persons who deliberately inhale cigarette smoke are known as smokers and those who use e-cigarettes are called vapers. But what about people who obtain their regular supply of nicotine from skin patches or chewing gum? Should we call them patchers and chewers, respectively? I propose, in order to simplify the terminology as well as more accurately to reflect [...]
Inhale deeply To understand the smoking problem one needs to understand smokers. And the way to do this is to talk to them. Two of the questions I ask all smokers who come to see me for help in quitting are, ‘At what age, and why, did you start?’ […]
Is this what smoking does to you? According to The Independent (12 December 2017) a 24 year-old woman was arrested in the US after she smoked in the toilet on a domestic flight. When confronted by the crew she caused a ruckus and ended up being arrested. Later, when asked why she decided to smoke on the plane [...]
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently announced it has awakened to the interesting idea that the way to help people quit smoking is for them to have a wider range of ‘products’ available in addition to so-called nicotine replacement therapy (NRT). The FDA recognises that NRT (nicotine-containing gum, patches, and lozenges) is of limited effectiveness and [...]
A headline in today’s online BBC news (so it must be true) announces ‘E-cigarettes: Cross-party group of MPs launches inquiry’. The main point of this exercise is to try and fill the ‘significant gaps’ in what is known about e-cigarettes including how effective they are as a stop-smoking tool and how they are (or should be) regulated. But [...]
My blog Mrs May – Save Us! was a critique that I wrote in January 2017 of an appeal by a group of 1000 doctors to the UK Prime Minister and Health Secretary to publish a new Tobacco Control Plan: https://www.nicotinemonkey.com/mrs-may-save-us/ The government did so, in rather a hurry it seems, in July 2017. The details are set [...]
You would think, would you not, that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner, Scott Gottlieb, MD, would understand a few basic facts about smoking and nicotine addiction. Yet, although he acknowledges that smoking is a pretty serious problem, causing more than 480,000 deaths in the US every year, in a press release of 28 July 2017 [...]
Gentle reader, bear with me until l come to the bit where I disclose the amazing revelation that recently came upon me. Now, the following is from the website of ASH (Action on Smoking and Health), quoting the UK National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE): While recognizing that quitting smoking is always the best option for [...]
I put ‘How to stop smoking’ in Google and this is what came up (emphases added) : Readers’ Digest The 23 Best Ways to Quit Smoking…Make an honest list of all the things you like about smoking…Then make another list of why quitting won’t be easy. WebMD So you're ready to kick the habit. That's great! Making that [...]
1. Fear Horrible pictures on cigarette packs and emphasizing that smoking causes cancer and heart disease assume people smoke because of ignorance of the consequences. This is not so. Everyone these days knows smoking is harmful to health. Scare tactics have relatively little effect because they don’t take into account the main reason people smoke: nicotine addiction, which [...]
‘Smokefree’ is a catchy neologism used by the NHS Smokefree campaign. It’s supported by Public Health England which is part of the UK government’s Department of Health. So it’s quite kosher. But what’s this? The Leicester City Stop Smoking Service at a quick glance looks similar: As we can see, it offers not just any old licensed products [...]
Why is this allowed? As an example of the continuing official confusion in about smoking/vaping, here is a statement (9 Dec 2016) by Cancer research UK: Harm reduction is a type of public health policy that aims to reduce the harmful consequences of substances, or actions, without necessarily reducing or eliminating the use itself. For example, condoms don’t [...]
Here is a fantastic piece of news about an undercover investigation by the Royal Society of Public Health, reported in April 2017. They found that nine out of ten retailers of e-cigarettes ‘are turning a blind eye to their use by non-smokers, and effectively pushing them as a lifestyle product.’ Very wicked! What are vape shop staff supposed [...]
In a recent edition of The British Medical Journal (11 February 2017, p 232), that doughty source of the latest medico-political developments, there is a blog by a Dr Mary Black about the problem of smoking in hospitals, titled ‘Is it time we stopped colluding with smokers?’ I felt moved to send a response; it was published in [...]
I hope the copywriters of Public Health England’s ‘Smokefree’ campaign will forgive me for my satirical review of their efforts which I put in a chapter of my book, Smoking is a Psychological Problem. At least they were trying, however misguidedly, to help smokers quit. Now, the other day I wished to refresh my memory about a detail [...]
Is this what we want to see? Among those involved in public health who see it as their task to ‘control’ tobacco by supporting measures to ‘drive down smoking rates,’ as they put it, a new refrain has arisen that has almost become a mantra: e-cigarettes are 95 per cent safer than smoking tobacco! Some tobacco controllers get [...]
What’s this? A smoking doctor? No, a vaping doctor! He has the unusual name of Attila Danko, which seems to be of Eastern European provenance, possibly Hungarian, and I hope he will forgive me for saying that this perhaps explains his passing resemblance to the actor Christopher Lee in his role as Dracula from next door Romania. He [...]
Here’s what we’ve all been waiting for! From the highly esteemed WebMD and identified as their ‘top pick’, you are invited to ‘Use This Plan to Stop Smoking’ – that is, if you're a smoker looking for advice on how to quit. Let’s click on the link and see. There’s a set of questions. These are some of [...]
Gentle reader, forgive my cynicism, but here we have another example of what might be called ‘The Hard Way to Quit Smoking’, this time from the website of New York City Government. I've put selected quotes in italics and added comments that an imaginary smoker might make as he or she reads through the site. The title is [...]
I have just come across an interesting presentation by one Maciej L Goniewicz, PhD, who works at the Tobacco Dependence Research Unit of Queen Mary University of London and the UK Centre for Tobacco Control Studies. So he should know what he’s talking about. Oh, and he receives research funding from Pfizer, a pharmaceutical company that makes drugs [...]
As part of my continuing efforts to keep up to date in the practice of medicine I subscribe to a generally very good online publication from America called, appropriately enough, UpToDate®. They send bi-weekly reminders of the latest research, and in today’s issue a section on e-cigarettes caught my eye. In America they are, rightly in my view, [...]
We have to thank the BBC for bringing us news of a major scandal (online 30 November 2016). Andre Calantzopoulos, the CEO of Philip Morris, a tobacco company that turned out 850 billion cigarettes in 2015 from which it generated net revenue of about $74 billion, was recently interviewed on the BBC. AC: We produce a product that [...]
As an example of everything that’s wrong with the orthodox approach to smoking cessation we need look no further than an online feature from Helpguide.org called How to Quit Smoking – A Guide to Kicking the Habit for Good. This is wrong from the very first word. You don’t need a how-to guide to quitting smoking. You just [...]
All right, Dr Symonds, what's the evidence that your method works? This hypothetical question, on the face of it, is not unreasonable. The question is about whether there have been any scientific trials to compare my method with other ways to quit smoking. A trial could be done like this: you find two hundred smokers who say they [...]
Is this the beginning of the end for ENDS? The acronym – much medical writing is peppered with annoying non-standard abbreviations of this sort – means Electronic Nicotine Delivery Systems. These drug-delivery devices (for that is what they are) were in the spotlight at a conference in India of the FCTC (there we go again) which means the [...]