Remember When You First Started Smoking?

No smoker started smoking for the effects of nicotine, and no smoker can tell me what nicotine DOES! So they are not smoking for the effects of nicotine, because they don’t even know what those effects ARE. It is a habit, not “drug use”.

The Trials of Edzard Ernst

 by hypnotherapist Chris Holmes Show me a hundred different scientific studies into the efficacy (or lack thereof) of any kind of therapy.  Will they all produce more or less the same findings?  No.  But why not?  If the RCT is the gold standard of assessment, surely it will just come up with truth, will it [...]

Just in case you thought it was just me…

…when I suggested that the Department of Health KNEW THEY WERE LYING when they made all those claims for the supposed ‘effectiveness’ of nicotine replacement poisoning: http://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2010/03/17/patrick-basham-the-doh-is-wrong-about-cessation/ Now: the plot thickens, as we hear rumours that the ELECTRONIC CIGARETTE is very likely to be BANNED in the U.K. towards the end of June – the [...]

Please Don’t Bother the Over-Prescriber!

In The Times this week, doctors were beseeching patients with only ordinary ailments like coughs and colds to stop bothering the general practitioner for antibiotics that won’t help anyway - or that they just don’t need, really – and  let nature take its course, or in other words have a bit of faith in your immune system. [...]

The Trials of Edzard Ernst

Show me a hundred different scientific studies into the efficacy (or lack thereof) of any kind of therapy.  Will they all produce more or less the same findings?  No.  But why not?  If the RCT is the gold standard of assessment, surely it will just come up with truth, will it not?  Isn’t this the [...]

Chantix Champix 6

Update, 4th November 2011: The American Food & Drug Administration (FDA) were reported in the Business section of the Washington Post as reassuring smokers that Chantix (known as Champix everywhere outside the USA) does not increase psychiatric problems, according to two small studies involving 26,000 smokers.  Since this flies in the face of everything else [...]