Cravings Are Not Withdrawal Symptoms

** Update 16/07.10: There is a link in the third comment at the end of this article to the website of Action on Smoking and Health (A.S.H.) which refers to a study on cravings that confirms exactly what I’m talking about here. God knows I never expected ASH to confirm or agree with anything [...]

Soon to be published… Volume II

An excerpt from Nicotine: The Drug That Never Was (Volume II: A Change Of Mind)
ii). The tobacco story has so many curious twists and turns that I am never really surprised when another one pops up. In Volume One I mentioned that I hadn’t quite managed to discover exactly when the “nicotine addiction” story [...]

How the NHS can save Lots Of Money!

Scrap the smoking cessation programme. As I demonstrated with all the evidence from the various government reports in “The NHS Lie Exposed” there is no significant difference between what smokers can achieve by themselves using willpower and the long term outcomes of NHS help, ie. when followed up at one year after “treatment”. [...]

Champix Chantix: Legal action, class actions, suing Pfizer

by Chris Holmes
*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. 
Several times I have [...]

Self-Administration Can Be Fun, Fun, Fun!

By Chris Holmes
The Non-Smoker Tries a Cigarette
Remember your first cigarette?  Or to be more precise, do you remember the first time you inhaled tobacco smoke properly and experienced the effect on the way you felt, physically and mentally?
If there was no alcohol in your system already at the time - or any other recreational drug [...]

The Quacks, the Hacks and the Therapists

Edzard Ernst, if we are to believe what certain hacks tell us, is in danger of losing his position at Exeter University - but it has nothing to do with his own behaviour, of course!  This is a link to a particularly lame piece from the Guardian’s Sarah Boseley which tries to suggest that the [...]

‘New Poison for Old!’ Part 2

(Sing!): “What Shall We Do With The Poison Factory…?”
In the original post entitled “New Poison For Old!” I pointed to the amusing phenomenon over recent years of the drug companies who have already spent a lot of money developing the facilities for producing nicotine gum, patches, lozenges, micro-tabs, nasal sprays and suppositories spending research and [...]

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 only competition [...]

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.
Very [...]

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 [...]