The headline to an article in the online The Scotsman (4 April 2018) laments that 'Smoke-free Scotland goal stalls as one in five fail [sic] to quit.' This is blamed on funding for smoking cessation campaigns being cut by the Scottish Government. The article elaborates: About one in five Scots, equivalent to 850,000 adults, are [sic] still lighting [...]

Gentle reader, let me ask you a hypothetical question. If you were in the unhappy position of being a smoker (i.e., nicotine addict), and you wanted to escape this predicament, do you think it would be a good idea to put more nicotine into your body before you even tried to quit? I have written before about this [...]

How to enjoy poisoning yourself ‘The English tobacco control/smoking cessation community is internationally regarded as utterly, hopelessly smitten with e-cigarettes. It’s become almost cult-like.’ These words were written by Professor Simon Chapman, the well-known Australian public health expert and anti-smoking campaigner, in response to a debate in The British Medical Journal (28 April 2018) on the question, ‘Should [...]

It’s an unfortunate fact that many smokers, although they dislike smoking and wish they didn’t have to do it, find the prospect of quitting very difficult. Therefore, it’s understandable that they seek help in how to stop smoking, including using nicotine patches. In theory, all that smokers need to do is to stub out their last cigarette and [...]

Continuing our look at quit-smoking ‘tips’ we can find many other websites where these words appear. For example: 13 Best Quit-Smoking Tips Ever With Pictures, 10 Scientific Quit-Smoking Tips, and Top Ten Tips on How to Stop Smoking. The last-mentioned misleadingly uses this heading to draw people into the site but no tips as such are given. The [...]

The March 2018 edition of the highly esteemed journal, Tobacco Control, contains interesting examples of infelicitous writing, to say nothing of wrong-headed ideas: addiction sticks and tobacco control vaccine. As part of an attack on Philip Morris International’s cynical and false claim, 'We're trying to give up cigarettes', it’s gratifying that the editor, Professor Ruth E Malone, is [...]

A fool and his money are soon parted – old English proverb. Modern version: There’s one born every minute. Whether it’s a seemingly miraculous cure for hair loss, type 2 diabetes, erectile dysfunction, or a recently rediscovered ancient formula guaranteed to abolish unhappiness, it’s all to be found on the internet. The spiel is always the same: a [...]

Here are some facts about a natural disaster, tuberculosis. According to WHO, in 2016: 10.4 million people fell ill with TB, and 1.7 million died from the disease. And now here are some facts about an unnatural disaster, smoking. Tobacco kills more than 7 million people each year. More than 6 million of those deaths are the result [...]

Schrödinger's cat, for readers who have not heard of it, is the name of a thought experiment devised by the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935. It is meant to illustrate a principle of quantum mechanics in which a cat in a box can be both dead and alive at the same time. I am not clever enough [...]

Under the guise of protecting public health, the pro-vaping lobby gets into some curious twists and turns. For example, there's an official-looking 2017 paper, Reshaping American Tobacco Policy. It's written by three people, one of whom, Clive Bates, oddly designates himself as ‘Director, Counterfactual’, evidently being unaware of what counterfactual means: pertaining to or expressing what has not [...]

Or so the makers of this latest e-cigarette device would have us believe. And what a clever name, suggestive of the jewel in the crown, no doubt. All right, Dr Symonds, that’s enough cynicism. What is Juul all about? Their website describes it as ‘The Satisfying Alternative To Cigarettes’. Do you know what the best and most satisfying [...]

In California there’s an organisation with the amusing name of Ash Kickers. It’s a six-session programme intended to cure you of smoking. Sounds interesting, but six sessions? And how do they do it? It’s based on the ‘trans-theoretical model of behaviour modification.’ Pardon? They explain: It helps smokers travel through the various stages of quitting smoking. These stages [...]

Professor Colin 'Nicotine' Mendelsohn, a self-styled tobacco treatment specialist, is a man with a mission. He has the noble goal of wanting to cure smokers of their dangerous habit of smoking – but he wants to do this by encouraging them to switch to e-cigarettes. I am sure our good Professor would agree that smokers smoke because they [...]

Let me explain. Tobacco Control is the name of a learned journal that states one of its aims is: To study the nature and consequences of…efforts to prevent and control the global tobacco epidemic. This is confused. The tobacco epidemic, as it’s called, is all too obviously in full swing. Therefore, it's too late to prevent it. What [...]

These words were spoken to me by the late Dr James Cyriax. He was lamenting the fact that he didn’t get the recognition he felt he deserved for his seminal work in diagnosing and treating the ubiquitous disorders of back pain, sciatica, shoulder pain, etc. Even after his death in 1985 his work has been largely ignored. A [...]

A clue as to the nature of the greatest barrier to quitting smoking is given in the utterance of a smoker patient who said to me, 'Thank you very much for the offer, Dr Symonds, but I’m not going to come for your stop-smoking session because I’m afraid that if I did, I would succeed.' Now, as part [...]

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 [...]

The highly esteemed WebMD, I discovered, has a series of fifteen quit smoking tips ‘for the first hard days’. Apart from the discouraging title rubbing it in that it will be hard – but why should it be hard? – none of these tips shows understanding of why people smoke in the first place and most of them [...]

An organisation called Yorkshire Cancer Research has put out a video entitled Vape to Quit. This video, titled Vape to Quit, though well meant, shows everything that’s wrong with the current approach to quitting smoking. I’ll transcribe some of the content and add my comments. Why do you need a 'way' to stop doing something? ‘There’s [sic] various [...]

The fuss about the depiction of smoking on a British TV programme called Love Island shown last year is still raging. I commented on this lamentable situation in a previous article, Steam and Smoke on Love Island, and made the point that ‘Any depiction of smoking in a contemporary film, play, or TV show should not be countenanced; [...]

I have a copy of the 4th (2009) edition of Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Stop Smoking. In 2015 the book was re-issued with a foreword by John Dicey. It’s otherwise identical, even to the pagination, to the 4th edition so it’s a bit misleading of Penguin Books to sell this as if it’s a new (6th) edition. [...]

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 [...]

Why should you have to do this all day, every day, for years on end? Now here’s something to ponder. A recent article in the online International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health reports a study of vaping with the wordy title of the sort commonly found in scholarly medical articles: ‘A Qualitative Exploration of the Role [...]

Towards the end of December each year many smokers announce a New Year’s resolution: to give up smoking. Or they might say they resolve to give up cigarettes. What they don't say, or if they did it would be meaningless, is that their New Year’s resolution is to try to give up smoking or cigarettes. Smokers often say, [...]

There are, it must be admitted, websites other than mine that claim to be able to cure smokers without nicotine, drugs, or willpower. What these sites offer are techniques. Don’t get me wrong. If smokers, after working their way through a ten-day course to learn how to replace the word ‘cigarette’ in their minds with the word ‘air’ [...]

Isn’t this fun, or isn’t it? Let’s hear it from a lady called Sarah in a video The Switch. The title reminds me of The Great Switcheroo in Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected—a collection of rather sinister stories for adults. […]

What is this colourful montage? It's comprised of the some of the logos of organisations from all over the world who were signatories to a letter addressed to André Calantzopoulos, CEO of Philip Morris International, and if they omitted his title on the envelope from lack of respect for this loathsome person I don’t blame them. If I did [...]

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?’ […]

Thanks to the online Metro Radio publication (2 January 2018), we learn that in the NHS’s North East region of England, over 38,000 patients are admitted to hospitals every year as a result of smoking-related illnesses. Riding to the rescue of this deplorable situation is Dr Robert Allcock, a respiratory consultant at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Gateshead, [...]

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 and on being confronted by the crew caused a ruckus. Later, when asked why she decided to smoke on the plane she replied, ‘the anxiety.’ [...]