A Direct Challenge

Nicotine Replacement doesn’t work at all in the long run (Harvard University) yet smokers are still being encouraged to waste their precious time with them, to no avail, when hypnotherapy would save many of them immediately.

by Chris Holmes, Senior Registered Hypnotherapist (GHR) and Smoking Cessation Specialist

More and more people are telling me privately that lots of people who work within the National Health Services know perfectly well that Nicotine Replacement Therapy does not work for more than 90% of smokers in the long run, and do not believe precious resources should be wasted on it. The only reason they are not speaking up, I’m told, is fear. They are afraid to voice an opinion because they might then be regarded by management as a troublemaker or whistle-blower.

If that is true, then thousands of smokers are dying needlessly and many more are at risk of serious illness, having their time and taxpayers’ millions wasted on bogus therapies. Lies are being told about success rates to persuade more smokers to use these products (see the Evidence section on this site), and the real failure rate covered up. This is not healthcare, it is fraud, and it is costing many lives.

Nicotine Replacement doesn’t work because the whole theory of nicotine addiction is bogus anyway. It’s a compulsive habit. It is not “both an addiction and a habit”, as the latest NRT promotion spin would have you believe. I know that for sure, because if it was, hypnotherapy would not eliminate the problem.

Just about every working day, for years now, I have eliminated smoking habits (including tobacco and cannabis habits) with hypnotherapy – wiping out cravings, and preventing weight gain, and without the need for willpower. A complete return to normal, usually in a single session. It’s not a trick – the book explains exactly how it all works. Even if some of those people return to smoking later – as some do – we can stop it again, no problem. It’s a complete cure, and that is precisely because it never was a drug addiction but a compulsive habit, just like gambling. No drug involved, and we eliminate these behaviours without reference to dopamine, seretonin or ‘nicotine receptors’ in the brain too, which kind of makes you wonder what relevance those theories have in reality, especially since that was the ‘science’ that gave us Prozac. **Update, Jan. 2012: Psychiatrists admit the seratonin tale is bullshit! **

I am issuing a direct challenge to the NHS and the Department of Health, calling for them to scrap NRT and Zyban, because their real long-term success rates are so low that they function very poorly even within the normal placebo range, and it is beginning to look as if everybody knows it but they are just wishing it wasn’t so, and hoping I’ll get all disillusioned and go away.  **Update Jan.2012:  Scientists at Harvard University finally prove me right!**

Every day I get more determined to stop this scandalous waste of life and resources. Do you agree? Do you not agree? Can we have more comments posted on the site please, so visitors can hear other voices too? I am particularly interested in comments from those working in medical roles, but all comments are welcome.

My satisfied clients are always asking me: “Why can’t we get hypnotherapy on the National Health?” A very good question! It is time for doctors and nurses who also think that’s a fair question to start making their feelings known perhaps. If everyone speaks up, then there’ll be more whistle-blowers than non-whistle-blowers!

Far too many chemicals and hardly any therapists – that’s a drug service, not a HEALTH service. But nicotine is a poison, and no-one should be prescribed poisons, it’s insane!

By the way, if you are simply afraid to speak out because of the potential repercussions, don’t forget you can do so here anonymously – and in any case, you can help out covertly by spreading the word: Truth Will Out!

Nicotine: The Drug That Never Was

More about hypnotherapy

Ask any Smoker

Ask any smoker what nicotine does, and you will find that they have no idea – I’ve asked thousands! Why not? Aren’t they supposedly smoking for the effects of nicotine? In truth, it’s all about cravings – and cravings have nothing to do with nicotine, as the latest research from Tel Aviv University confirms.

by Chris Holmes, Senior Registered Hypnotherapist (GHR) and Smoking Cessation Specialist

Smokers are told that they smoke tobacco for the effects of nicotine, and that smoking is an addiction. Yet if you ask any smoker what nicotine does, you will find that they haven’t got a clue. The most common guess is: “I think it relaxes me, or something.”

I have asked thousands of smokers what nicotine does, over the last nine years of practising hypnotherapy, and I’ve yet to find one who can give me a correct answer. This includes all the medical people who have come to me over the years to get rid of their own smoking habit, even the GPs who will have prescribed nicotine products to some of their patients.

This proves that smokers are not smoking for the effects of nicotine – they don’t even know what those effects are!

The Actual Effects of Nicotine

If you take nicotine into the body in tiny amounts, like through smoking tobacco or sticking a nicotine patch on, it only does four things. It makes your heart beat too fast, and your blood pressure rise. It also raises fat levels in the blood, which is useless and may clog the arteries eventually. Nicotine also inhibits the body’s production of a chemical which normally breaks up blood clots in the bloodstream, so it raises the risk of thrombosis.

If you take it in any more than tiny amounts, it will kill you outright, for it is a very deadly poison. So smokers are not smoking for the effects of nicotine and never were. They smoke because of cravings, which are nothing but an impulse to repeat the usually habitual behaviour. They have nothing to do with nicotine, or anything else in the smoke. In hypnotherapy we shut these signals down.

We get lots of cravings, they are not all about tobacco.

Full explanation here.

If you just want to stop smoking, click here for more info.

N.I.C.E.

I see the National Institute for Chemical Excess is at it again, trying to make sure no potential customers are missed in the brave project to get the whole of the U.K. on medication.

They are advising GPs to check back through their patient records for anyone with cholesterol levels that are allegedly ‘too high’ but who is not currently taking statin drugs for that, to see if the doctor cannot shift more of these tablets at public expense by persuading patients that they should take them, whether they want to or not. The suggestion is that they ‘need’ them to protect them from heart attacks, which everyone knows are caused by too much cholesterol. Too much bad cholesterol, that is. Good cholesterol is different, as everyone knows.

Everyone ‘knows’ these things because everyone has been told this many, many times, and although some people take no notice because they are dubious about medical advice, since it seems to keep changing all the time, others are afraid enough of heart attacks to take whatever pills are currently being prescribed, assuming that it is all backed up by hard science.

Well, it rather depends upon who you believe. Personally I believe Dr Malcolm Kendrick, author of The Great Cholesterol Con (John Blake Publishing 2007). So although my cholesterol levels are allegedly ‘too high’, having read that book I’ve decided to remain drug-free and take my chances.

Recently my father’s GP offered him statins because his cholesterol was slightly higher than the regulations demand. He politely declined, having lived his entire life having virtually nothing to do with medical services of any kind. He is eighty this year, and has never had any trouble with his heart, so he took the radical and reckless view that he didn’t need to spend the rest of his life on medication either.

It certainly wouldn’t take them long to check back through his medical records.

the hypnotherapy alternative

Champix/Chantix 2

*Update: If you or a loved one has suffered a bad reaction to Champix and you are based in the U.K., you can report it to the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) here. The more people do that the clearer the true picture will become. Protect others! Report it.*

Steadily the disquiet about this medication seems to be building, particularly in the U.S., where it was made available first. There are certainly bad reports, but there are quite a few good reports as well. Trouble is, it is difficult to know whether these are genuine, or some form of marketing. I think there is certainly some of that going on – one of the responses sent to this site regarding my previous blogpost on Champix was full of praise for the medication, but it came from a site that was selling the stuff! No bias there then.

So once again – give us your views, if you have tried Champix and managed not to kill yourself. Those Champix users that did kill themselves, I’m not suggesting for a moment that the tragedy had anything to do with them taking Champix, you understand. People suffer sudden, severe personality changes and top themselves all the time, don’t they? Sure they do.

It’s probably caused by nicotine withdrawal, just as Pfizer are saying – I mean, just think of all those people you’ve known over the years that quit the fags, and then just a few weeks later threw themselves off a bridge.  Probably one in every family, I should think.  No, it can’t be anything to do with Champix – I mean, they tested it on a few people for twelve weeks and everything.

*If you would like to know more about hypnotherapy for stopping smoking, visit the Central Hypnotherapy website.

** To read the earlier post on Champix, and all the comments so far, click the Blogpost Category Champix/Chantix on the right side of this page.

Posting Comments on the Site

Although I’ve not had a lot of time to attend to the site since the Truth Will Out Campaign was launched, I did wonder why all the comments I was getting were coming through the Contact Us facility, no-one was apparently posting comments on the site itself. So I tested it, by trying to post a comment to see if something was wrong with the system.

Nothing wrong with the system, I had just completely forgotten that comments have to be moderated at this end before they are posted, to weed out all the spam! I hadn’t even looked at the moderation file – in fact once I’d been shown how to find it, back in March, I completely forgot it existed until today.

So apologies to anyone who posted a comment, this software is new to me! I assure you that any valid comment that is posted will now be moderated almost daily. Do please feel free to post comments about any of this, let’s get some proper debates going, I don’t want this whole site to be my opinion – although it may have seemed that way until now! Have your say: as long as it is valid opinion it will be welcome.

**If the “Leave a Reply” facility is not visible below this post – or any other post in the blog – click on the “No Comments” below.  Obviously some posts will have some comments already, so if it says “40 comments”, click on that and the Reply facility will appear.

Central Hypnotherapy website

Support is growing!

Four hypnotherapy associations have already confirmed that they are actively supporting the Truth Will Out Campaign – informing their members, linking to the site and promoting the Campaign through newsletters and similar publications.

N.B. The only support we have ever requested is for professional associations to inform their members about the campaign so that they are fully aware of the details. Any group or individual may participate more actively if they wish to, but our only request is that members are made aware of the campaign’s existence, so they can form their own opinion.

Individual messages of support continue to pour in, and more and more people are linking to the Truth Will Out site. Anyone involved in, or even interested in the field of complementary medicine may link to the Truth Will Out site, without making a formal request. We are grateful for their support. If you agree that nicotine is a poison posing as a medication, the best way to assist the case is to spread the word – to anyone and everyone, and in whatever way you can without contravening any laws.

Of all the organisations that we have approached within the professional field of hypnotherapy, none have yet refused support – most are still considering and consulting on how they prefer to respond to our request in due course. We can still confirm that since the site was launched on March 8th 2008, this Campaign has not generated one single hostile comment or criticism in respect of either its aims, or any of the evidence published on the site or in the book. Not one – despite 48,000 hits on the site (to date) from all over the world. No-one has stood up in defence of Nicotine Replacement Poisoning. Not one doctor, nurse, pharmacist or even the people who make the poison nicotine for sale to the general public. That’s a bit odd, don’t you think, for something that’s supposed to be an “evidence-based medicine”?

Three newspaper articles so far. Three television appearances with the book. Not one objection or disagreement received yet, and I first published the book in October 2007.

This is just the beginning.

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Daily Mail article

It is really “evidence-based” medicines that are killing and harming people in ever-increasing numbers, not any sort of complementary medicine. Drugs are what the public need protecting from, not alternative approaches which hardly ever harm anyone!

I’m going to leave this subject aside for a bit after this, but thanks to my colleague up North who sent this in: a recent report by The Daily Mail’s Medical Correspondent Jenny Hope. Apparently the number of deaths in the UK from adverse reactions to medications has risen by 131 per cent since 1997. This is clear evidence that medications are killing and seriously harming people in ever-greater numbers.

The number of prolonged hospitalisations due to severe allergic reactions or serious side effects rose by 82% in the same period, totalling 41,935 people over the last ten years. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that these medications have not been tested as well as they should have been, and that at least some of them should not have been passed as if they were safe. Nicotine Replacement products certainly should not have been approved – but we’ll never know how many heart attacks and strokes they have caused, since that poison was stupidly given the official status of “medication”, despite having no medicinal properties whatsoever.

8,077 of these people with severe adverse reactions to medicines died as a result, with last year’s UK fatality rate of 1,031 being the highest yet. Let me make this quite clear: these people were not killed by illness, but by medicines that were officially approved as safe by the existing system. They proved not to be – and although a certain amount of this sort of thing is inevitable if you are going to prescribe drugs at all, these numbers are frightening – especially when you add that to the number of people now being killed by superbugs contracted whilst in hospitals. How long will it be before people are more afraid of doctors and hospitals than they are of being ill? Will more people end up dying soon because they are too afraid of medicines and hospitals to seek medical help?

To put it simply, medicines are supposed to make you better, not hospitalise or kill you. In the article, an unnamed spokesperson for the Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Agency suggested that recent reforms had encouraged doctors, healthcare professionals and patients to be more pro-active in reporting adverse reactions to the Agency. “As a result,”she says glibly, “the number has gone up.”

As reassurances go, this leaves a lot to be desired. It is rather like saying: “Don’t worry, it isn’t really getting worse. It has always been that bad. We just improved our Making A Note Of It system.”

Oh. So what we are really seeing here is an improvement, is it? I can’t help wondering what Edzard Ernst, Exeter University’s Professor Against Complementary Medicine makes of all this. As a former member of the Medicines Commission of the British Medicines Control Agency (MCA), which has evidently been approving as ‘safe enough’ many of the medicines that have caused all this suffering and death, does he not feel agonized by the sheer hypocrisy of his ridiculous position in suggesting things like chiropractic and homeopathy are “dangerous”? He says nothing – nothing – about the thousands of innocent people being damaged or killed by the very medications he was personally involved in approving, but works very hard to make sure no-one can say anything positive about complementary medicine without him leaping up to object, and the truly sickening thing is that he claims to be doing that to protect the public.

From what – homoeopathy? When did that ever hospitalise anyone, you sneaky little Professor Against Complementary Medicine? If you really wanted to protect the public, you could do a better job of it by warning people about the real dangers of some of the medications that should never have been passed in the first place, like Champix for example. But protecting the public isn’t your real concern, is it Eddie? That’s just a pose. That’s why you keep referring to pharmaceutical products as “evidence-based”, when the real evidence is that they are killing and damaging more people than ever before, whereas complementary medicine obviously isn’t. You’re a Misinformation Machine, you are. Shame on you, Edzard. Shame on you and all your smug “quackbuster” buddies – you’re PROTECTING the real quacks (Pfizer, GSK et al) by creating this anti-CAM smokescreen in the media, and people are dying as a result.

Now that I’ve got that off my chest… if you would like to know more about hypnotherapy – which the medical authorities in the U.K. are still officially describing as “unproven” thanks to the unholy influence of the pharmaceutical industry! – visit the Central Hypnotherapy website.

They are lying, by the way: the British Medical Association endorsed hypnotherapy as a valid form of treatment in 1955.  Of course, that was way back when they were a genuinely independent body, before they were controlled by the evil and utterly ruthless pharmaceutical industry.

Internet Kills Doctor

by Chris Holmes

Personally I think the Internet is a wonderful thing in many respects, but I got emails today from internet pharmacies that are practically boasting that you can cut out the medical advice and just buy anything you want! Someone calling themselves Heinig put this in the Subject line:

“Prescriptions are a thing of the past”

and the message within was:

“Discover more pages of kamasutra with the help of magic blue pills”

Magic pills, eh? Isn’t this ironic? Anyone who has already read the “Trust me, I’m a Doctor” section of this site will see the irony of that. First you get people to accept the idea that there is a pill for every ill through the invocation of the “trustworthiness” of “medical science”, then you do away with the actual medics, who might be unnecessarily cautious about who to prescribe it to, and sell it direct by email worldwide.

Healthcare? This mass-medication has nothing to do with health, but western medical science has helped to create a monster – the pharmaceutical industry – which is now on the rampage around the globe. This was another message in the same batch this morning:

Subject: “Hundreds of doctors advise this”

Yeah? Well, what further recommendation or reassurance do you need, eh? Here was the message inside, word for word:

“You can purchase anything and everything that you always wanted to ask your doctor for.”

Everything? Even the stuff you know damn well he wouldn’t give you, which is why you didn’t ask him but “always wanted to”?

Well it could hardly be any clearer, could it? Forget Colombia, forget the poppy fields of Afghanistan. The producers of pharmaceuticals are supplying the customer direct, so now you don’t need the drug-dealer and you don’t need the doctor either, and these pseudo-medical profiteers are even bold enough to say so. We’ve reached the stage at which they are so cocky, they can take the piss out of the medical profession by claiming:

“Hundreds of doctors advise this”!

Now, here’s the really mad bit. Doctors most certainly do not “advise” that you buy drugs through the internet, because if everyone did that, they would be sitting in their consulting rooms all by themselves. But doctors certainly have been prescribing these very medications, which could be construed as a recommendation of sorts, which allows that cheeky phrase above to be at least partially true.

So doctors are being used, but left out! They are still being invoked as a reassuring selling-point, albeit in a very off-hand way, but without being involved any more, which means they are helping to facilitate the sale (in their absence), but earning nothing from that transaction at any stage. Pretty galling, eh?

It’s all there, in that wild expression: “Prescriptions are a thing of the past”. If that is the case, then so are doctors – they just haven’t quite realised it yet. They really haven’t, because the main point doctors have wanted the public to grasp so far, when it comes to internet drugs, is that some of the may be ‘fake’. Really? Like NRT is, you mean? Like Prozac? Sorry – are we talking real fake medications here, or bogus fake medications?

I’m confused. If you buy NRT from an internet source, and it doesn’t work, is that because it is real NRT or because it isn’t? The only way we could find out would be to do a big scientific study using internet NRT exclusively, to see if it only fails 94% of smokers by the end of the year – in which case it was the real thing, hooray! Or more than 94%, in which case it was a bad medicine, a bogus fake disreputable fraud, which doctors would not prescribe.

Because no doctor would prescribe NRT products that failed more than 94% of smokers in the long run. They draw the line at 94% failure. That’s the kind of medical standard which you just do not get with the internet, and that’s why we still need doctors.

Hope we’re all clear on that now.  If you just want to be free of the smoking habit, though, click here to discover why you don’t need either of ’em.

Nicotine Contradictions

by hypnotherapist Chris Holmes

Haven’t we seen an extraordinary shift in the way nicotine is regarded over the last couple of decades? When Nicotine Replacement products first appeared, they were only available on prescription. A doctor had to review each case, to see if it was safe enough or appropriate for the patient to use that. After all, nicotine is a highly poisonous substance which, in the wrong dose, could trigger a heart-attack or a stroke. It is often referred to as “the most addictive drug in the world”. Newspapers, renowned for their technical accuracy, have frequently observed that it is “more addictive than heroin”.

OK – so if all that’s true, how did we reach the current situation in which any adult can pick it up at Tesco, no questions asked? If it is a highly addictive drug, who decided it was okay to sell it at the filling station? Of course they sell cigarettes, but allowing that was not a recent decision! And I know you can buy strong painkillers like hydrocodone from an internet pharmacy, but that is because no government can stop it (apparently), it wasn’t the government’s idea to make that possible!

Whilst various bodies argue the toss about whether cannabis should be graded B class or C class in the scale of illegal drugs, the substance alleged to be more addictive than a class A drug is now on open sale in any supermarket, thanks to a series of increasingly liberal decisions which seem to take no account of its legendary ‘addictiveness’.

Seems a bit reckless, doesn’t it? I mean what is to stop people who didn’t even smoke in the first place becoming hooked on it too? Where are the usual safeguards that protect society from such dangerous substances? In pharmacies, diamorphine (heroin) is always kept locked away in the Dangerous Drugs Cabinet, which is bolted to the floor – but the nicotine products are out there on the supermarket shelves for any adult to pick up!  So – why not just do that with everything?

“Excuse me! Do you have any Setlers Tums?”

“Sure! They’re just down there on the right, next to the most addictive drug in the world, the methodone and the smokable crack substitute.  By the way, don’t miss our new special offer on high explosives, Aisle 9!  Have a nice day!”

Doesn’t add up, does it? Especially when you consider that every single day, millions of people walk right past “the most addictive drug in the world” without any inclination to even try it – and that includes millions that are allegedly addicted to it already!

Try doing that with heroin, and by lunchtime it will be blindingly obvious why that cabinet needs bolting to the floor.

Nicotine: The Drug That Never Was 

the hypnotherapy alternative

“How to Stop Your Doctor Killing You”

Even by my forthright standards, this is a provocative title but it is not hyperbole. Former GP and hospital physician Dr Vernon Coleman has published this book, which warns the public that: “The person most likely to kill you is not a burglar, a mugger, a deranged relative or a drunken driver. The person most likely to kill you is your doctor. This book explains how to protect yourself from this serious threat to your life and good health.”

This echoes the sentiments of Dr Malcolm Kendrick, whose 2007 book The Great Cholesterol Con warns that Statin drugs are dangerous and don’t really work, and the comments of leading psychiatrist Professor David Healy (see Trust Me, I’m a Doctor elsewhere on this site). He is dismayed by the total lack of accountability in the drug industry:

“In other organisations, when evidence of disregard for public safety emerges, heads roll. But there have been no resignations following these drug disasters – barely a flicker of embarrassment. The distortion and lack of corporate accountability makes me much slower to hand out new drugs. I even feel apprehensive if someone I know has to go to the doctor.”

What has all this to do with Nicotine Replacement Poisoning? Same system. Same approval bodies. Same drug giants. It’s just that NRT was approved so long ago, you are just supposed to assume that it was all properly tested and it wouldn’t have been passed if it didn’t work. Professor David Healy knows better than to assume that, because he has personally sifted through boxes concealing thousands of confidential internal company documents concerning other medications that had already been passed by the system as if they were both safe and effective:

“No-one outside the two companies, and few within them, knew what the boxes contained; I saw them because I was an expert witness in a court case.” These experiences have left him feeling:

“…apprehensive if someone I know has to go to the doctor”.

Still confident that nicotine products are safe and above board? Where medications are concerned, it is no longer safe to assume anything, as Dr Coleman wants everyone to be aware for the sake of their safety and indeed their life.

safer alternative