Thanks to that fount of medical wisdom, The British Medical Journal (BMJ), we learn from the 23 November 2024 edition that ‘a new treatment option is proposed by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence to help people stop smoking.’ (At least they don’t say they’re going to roll out the new treatment.)

This refers to cytisine, a drug derived from the plant Cytisus laburnum. And apparently, ‘new evidence showed that people who received cytisine were 30 per cent more likely not to smoke for six months or longer than with placebo or no medication.’ Well, fancy that!

This is where science comes up again common sense. Cytisine is supposed to work by blocking nicotine receptors in the brain, and therefore – Bingo! – the urge to smoke will be attenuated. How do they know that, by the way? But even if it’s true, from a practical point of view it’s of very little or no help, as I shall explain.

Putting aside the curious idea that smokers need treatment, let alone treatment options, to quit, this brief passage in the BMJ encapsulates much that is wrong with the orthodox approach to the problem.

It perpetuates the widely held but mistaken and discouraging idea that quitting smoking is terribly difficult, so you’ll need a drug to help you. It’s supposed to reduce ‘cravings’, whatever these are. Smokers are almost reduced to a state of helplessness: they can’t quit on their own. But all that cytisine will do for smokers, if anything, is that they’ll be 30 per cent more likely not to smoke, or 70 per cent likely to continue smoking, with the dubious help of this drug.

But the biggest blind spot that academic smoking cessation investigators have is failure to recognise that smokers don’t want to stop – that’s why they smoke. Smoking is not a disease over which patients have not control – it’s a voluntary abnormal activity.

The urge to smoke may seem hard to resist, but this is a psychological problem. It’s a problem, however, that can be easily overcome if smokers understand why it seems so hard to resist lighting another cigarette and sucking the poisonous fumes therefrom into their lungs. The actual withdrawal symptoms, if any, as smokers can easily be helped to demonstrate to themselves, are not that bad.

Furthermore, cytisine will only be of potential benefit to those smokers who chose to take it. And even if they do, if they’re one of the 70 per cent who are likely to continue smoking in spite of using this drug, they have an excuse handed to them on a plate, or rather, on an ashtray, to continue smoking: the cytisine didn’t work!

This approach to smoking cessation assumes that a significant number of smokers want to quit, find it too hard on their own, and will be glad to take up the offer of any promising method so they can at last cease poisoning themselves with tobacco smoke. But they don’t. Most smokers will ignore offers of help to quit with cytisine or other methods – because they don’t want to quit.

Apart from the complicated dosing regimen, starting with 1 tablet every two hours and gradually reducing over 25 days to 1 tablet twice a day, let’s now look at the possible side effects, more accurately called harms, of cytisine. I’ll mention just those that are documented as being very common:

Increase in appetite, weight gain, dizziness, irritability, mood changes, anxiety, increase in blood pressure, dry mouth, diarrhoea, rash, fatigue, sleep disorders, drowsiness, nightmares, headaches, increase in heart rate, nausea and vomiting, alteration of taste sensation, heartburn, constipation, abdominal pain, and muscle pain.

Is that enough for you? Why should you have to swallow all these pills and risk harmful effects in order to become a non-smoker again? All you need to do to return to this happy state is simply to stop smoking! I can show you how to do this with my personalised quit smoking method.

I use no drugs including nicotine, hypnosis, or gimmicks. It’s a matter of being helped to understand – very simple! – why you don’t really want to quit. Then, for most smokers, it will be straightforward to cease smoking straightaway, and for good.

Text © Gabriel Symonds

Picture credit: LilytheKawaiiUnicat