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 [...]

You can’t say they’re not trying. Here’s news of a campaign by an organisation with the pleasant name of Fresh, announced in the online News Guardian (24 February 2017), to try to get smokers to quit. Well, so they should, if they know what’s good for them. Readers are reminded that cutting down on smoking still leaves you [...]

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 [...]

Here’s an amazing news story. No, it’s not the Flat Earth News, but comes from the hallowed pages of The Scottish Sun. (Online edition, 25 January 2017.) First, the surprising headline: GPs telling smokers how soon they will die ‘makes them three times more likely to quit’. Now hang on a minute. How is it that GPs have [...]

From the pages of that trusty source of the latest developments in medical politics, The British Medical Journal (7 January 2017), comes an arresting news item: More than 1000 doctors and other healthcare workers…have written an open letter to the prime minister, Theresa May, and England’s health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, urging them to publish a new Tobacco Control [...]

In the Tobacco Control Industry three unhelpful concepts regularly crop up in learned articles in scholarly journals. Or scholarly articles in learned journals. Trying to give up This idea is derived from the common response people give if asked whether they smoke. If they do, they're likely to say, ‘Yes – but I’m trying to give up.’ It’s [...]

Here is a sad story which illustrates a little-known sad fact about smoking. It was recently reported in the Southern Daily Echo online news that ‘a Mum tried to smuggle nearly 35,000 cigarettes through Southampton docks’. It is said that she ‘tried to avoid paying almost £11,500 in tax by storing the tobacco in her luggage following a [...]

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 [...]

A little while ago I was waiting in a queue to change some money at Haneda Airport when I noticed a strong smell of tobacco. At first I thought it was coming from someone nearby, because the clothes of a heavy smoker can reek of tobacco, but then I realised I was standing outside the Smoking Room. Periodically, [...]

Smoking ‘harm reduction’ advocates seem to be working from the premise that some degree of harm is inevitable or unavoidable in relation to smoking. But this is manifestly untrue. The harm from smoking could be eliminated rather than just reduced – if there were the political will to ban tobacco products. In the meantime the prevailing view seems [...]

What are nicotine withdrawal symptoms? I have done a survey of the records of the last one hundred patients I treated for smoking cessation in face-to-face sessions. These records contain near-verbatim accounts of what patients say in reply to open-ended questions, since I have found this is the best way to gain an understanding of what is going [...]

I've said it before and I’ll say it again: almost everything that most people believe about smoking is wrong. Browsing the internet will reveal plenty of examples. Here's one I came across recently. It’s a YouTube video by a certain Dr Eric Berg. He’s not a doctor in the usual sense of the word but a chiropractor. Chiropractic [...]

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 [...]

If you’re like me, before you leave your home you need to check, and double check, that you’ve got your keys, wallet, and phone. Women do not have this problem because they keep everything they need, and probably a lot more besides, in their handbags. However, life has just become more complicated, at least for some people, according [...]

Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) is a charity set up by the Royal College of Physicians of the UK. It’s supported by those worthy bodies, the British Heart Foundation and Cancer Research UK. ASH's website informs us that it’s ‘a campaigning public health charity that works to eliminate the harm caused by tobacco.’ So far so good. [...]

    Smog in Piccadilly Circus, 1952     Do you know what a pea-souper is? You don’t really want to know, at least not at first-hand. It was the humorous name given to an decidedly unfunny atmospheric condition, not uncommon in the winter months in London in the nineteenth century and up to the 1950s, when a combination [...]

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 held in India in 206 of the FCTC (there we go again) [...]

I recently signed up for the Vaping Post, an online publication that ‘brings information on vaping’. They add, ‘We consider that the electronic cigarette (vaporizer) is a method of risk reduction for adult smokers who can’t or don’t want to quit smoking.’ Having set out their raison d'être they rightly caution that: Vaping exposes the user to the [...]

Here we have the delusions of smoking in full flight, by a – I presume tongue-in-cheek – article by Allan Massie in the current edition of the entertaining Taki’s Magazine. He thinks it’s better to smoke and be happy,even if you die young from heart disease or cancer as a result, rather than from Alzheimer’s disease which he [...]

His Holiness the Dalai Lama, as usual, has got it right. Any substance addiction will affect your inner peace and health. Nicotine and alcohol addiction are often linked in people’s minds and may be reflected in their responses to a suggestion that they should stop smoking: ‘I smoke, but I don’t drink’ – so that’s all right then. [...]

The distinguished medical journal, The Lancet, in June 2016 reported the results of a huge multinational collaborative effort to investigate the risks of psychiatric side-effects of two drugs used in smoking cessation: varenicline (Champix®) and bupropion (Zyban®); no evidence of increased harm was found compared with nicotine patches and placebo (dummy) treatments. This must have been good news [...]

Not everyone is happy about e-cigarettes. Dr Phil Banfied, chairman of the British Medical Association's Welsh Council, wants to see proof of their safety. To emphasize the need for caution with these new drug (nicotine) delivery devices, he reminded the audience at a BMA Welsh Council meeting that thalidomide, which was originally thought to be safe, turned out [...]

In the best tradition of the orthodox approach to smoking cessation, this year’s vintage of the quaintly named Stoptober scheme, produced by NHS England, has just finished. At least it’s an improvement on the previous two versions. Last year’s seemed intended to encourage smokers to quit through humour. Is it a laughing matter? The idea of Stoptober is [...]