Tag Archives: stop smoking

The Facts About Smoking Don’t Leave Much for Consideration

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You don’t have to go back many years to find a time and place where smoking was seen as normal, healthy, and cool. It took researchers many years to get their message through that smoking is causing more deaths than anything else we put in our bodies in society today. The government has been working hard to get information out, especially to the young ones, to try to prevent smoking and also get those that smoke off the cigarettes.

It’s amazing to read about all the benefits you can get if you quit smoking. What happens when you stop smoking is that your body slowly starts turning back to normal, and your risk profile for smoking related illnesses decreases dramatically. Take lung cancer. When you have been on smoke cessation for 10 years your risk of lung cancer has decreased up to 50% compared to someone who continues smoking. As for heart disease, where 20% of all deaths due to heart attacks, etc, can be linked to smoking, your risk will be half as big after one year. Those are pretty spectacular statistics to look at for someone considering quitting smoking.

There are of course other benefits as well. Cigarettes cost a lot of money, and in some countries the government has placed large taxes on them. When you stop smoking you will save a lot of money, and you can use that money for a well deserved vacation, perhaps as a prize to yourself for quitting.

You also stop sending the message to young people that smoking is ok. If you have kids, think about the influence you have on them. When they see you smoke you are literally saying that smoking is ok for them to do also when they grow up. Do you want them to risk lung cancer or heart disease?

The facts about smoking don’t leave much for consideration. If you want to prevent a death due to unnatural causes it is pretty safe to say that quitting smoking decreases that risk by a large factor.

The Ineffectiveness Of NRT As A Stop Smoking Aid

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If you are thinking about giving up smoking and want to give some nicotine replacement therapy a shot then I’ll save you the time and the effort by informing you that they probably aren’t going to work. The reason for that should be patently obvious to anyone but we have been sold a believable story by the companies who make these products, and we are blinded to the reality that all these products do is keep us addicted to the drug we are trying to quit. How many smokers have you met that give up smoking using NRT who are still off the cigarettes a year later? I can tell you that I have never met one person that managed it myself, not one, and I know a lot of smokers.

I’m sure there are people in the world who have accomplished this task but then maybe the same people would have quit using sheer willpower alone. It certainly doesn’t seem to me that the NRT is helping many of us to quit. I could be wrong of course, maybe the unconvincing figures these companies give us are actually true, a few more people who use NRT manage to stop, but if it was truly effective you would think the majority of smokers who used them would manage to quit.

I was reading about a study in Science Daily.com which showed in a double blind study that 6% of smokers who used nicotine gum where still off the cigarettes after 6 months. Go back and read that figure again, its not a misprint. 6% of people who used nicotine gum for 6 months found it to be effective. I often wonder how these companies are allowed to make claims about the effectiveness of their products.

At the same time we have the FDA telling us that we should be wary about using E Cigarettes as a stop smoking aid because they might be dangerous to our health. As if inhaling nicotine and propyene glycol could in any way be even close to as dangerous as inhaling the burning tobacco smoke that we’re trying to quit when we use them. My guess is that the warnings about electronic cigarettes has got more to do with the fact that the actually might work and pharmaceutical companies are scared that they might lose sales of there ineffective, overprice nicotine-laced chewing gum.