Evidence

The first tentative steps to include alternative medicine into the NHS were dealt a heavy blow on 19th May 2006, when a group of 13 professors and 1 Consultant Clinical Scientist published an open letter to the Chief Executive of St.George's Healthcare NHS Trust in London, claiming concern about “unproven or disproved treatments” such as (they claimed) homeopathy, and other complimentary medicine which they said had “not been tested as pharmaceutical products, but which are known to cause adverse effects”. They warned the Chief Executive that “our ability to explain and justify to patients the selection of treatments, and to account for expenditure on them more widely, is compromised if we abandon our reference to evidence.” (My emphasis.)

I quite agree. And I'm sure any taxpayer would agree that if the UK government had spent hundreds of millions of pounds of their money since 2001 on – say – crystal therapy, to help people quit smoking, and an independent review commissioned by the Department of Health turned up a failure-rate (at one-year follow-up) of 94%, it would be inconceivable that they would seek to hush up those findings and carry on regardless, would it not? Because that would be abandoning their reference to evidence to a truly staggering (and corrupt) degree. Especially if they had been publicly claiming success-rates of anything between 53% and even as high as 85% for the old crystals, using a model for defining 'success' that didn't even follow up cases for as long as a month. Yet that is exactly what has happened with the poison nicotine.

Not tested “as pharmaceutical products”? That one won't wash now, after the Prozac fiasco. “Known to cause adverse effects”? Read the label of any pharmaceutical medication and just look at the side-effects listed there. It is clear that the more reactionary elements in medical authority are quite keen on “reference to evidence” if it suits them, but perfectly willing to ignore it or even suppress it if it does not. There's big money in pharmaceuticals, and therefore in being in positions of influence – and if thousands of smokers are fobbed off with useless products, well – it's not personal. It's just business. The only problem is, it is supposed to be healthcare, not business. “These are not trivial matters”, warned Professor Michael Baum and the other thirteen apostles of the pharmaceutical industry in their pompous letter of 2006. No, they are not, Professor. Hundreds of thousands of smokers have died since that stupid policy was introduced – and they continue to do so - and hundreds of millions in NHS resources thrown away - that's the evidence. Just how are you going to “explain and justify” that, to the families of all the smokers who have died because you and your kind have been wilfully abandoning reference to it quite happily for years, you hypocrite?

This website is all about evidence, and all the evidence is accessible through this site. Nicotine: The Drug That Never Was is a 400-page book, so obviously the material selected for this website is only a fraction of that. Documents reproduced here are divided into sections:

• Section A - Evidence of the high figures routinely published as “success rates” by NHS/DoH.
• Section B - Evidence of the actual long-term results of Nicotine Replacement products.
• Section C - Evidence that Department of Health reporting of that was misleading.
• Section D - Evidence that warnings about the NRT policy were ignored.
• Section E - Evidence that Hypnotherapy has long been known to be much more successful for smoking cessation than medical methods.
• Section F - Other independent endorsements of hypnotherapy generally.
• Section G - Endorsements of Chris Holmes' remarkable success as a therapist.

All the official documents reproduced here were published on the internet either by the NHS, the Department of Health, The Royal College of Physicians or similar official bodies, and the stories they tell are so wildly at odds with each other that it is obvious the public have been seriously misled - deliberately and consistently - about the effectiveness of these pharmaceutical products and medical services, to such a degree that if they knew the truth, they would not waste their time with them or want their taxes wasted on them. The DoH knows this perfectly well, which is why they tried to make the long-term NHS success rate look like fifteen percent when it is actually half that, or even less.

Evidence B - The actual long-term results of NRT

(excerpt 1 from Nicotine: The Drug That Never Was)

In 2004 alone, two million prescriptions for NRT were dispensed “worth a total value of £44 million.” According to the Department of Health:

“NRT or Zyban doubles the chances of a smoker successfully quitting and use has increased substantially year on year.”

That sounds good on the face of it, doesn’t it? Doubles the chances of a smoker quitting, eh? Bear that statement in mind, I shall be returning to it in due course.

How many people do you know personally who have tried NRT products at some time? Of all those attempts to quit using tobacco, how many succeeded that way permanently? The truth is, most of the smokers in the U.K. today, especially those who have been smoking for more than five years, will have tried at least one NRT product at some time. This is partly because the British Government decided to make them available on prescription from 2001. Vast amounts of taxpayers’ money has rolled into the coffers of the drug companies since then. Yet it is very difficult, for some reason, to get any detailed statistics for the number of smokers currently in the UK, or sufficient statistics regarding the changing trend in the number of UK smokers since 2001, so that we could compare it with the falling trend in tobacco smoking in the previous five year period, from 1996 to 2001, before NRT was made available on prescription.

The Department of Health has previously reported that the number of smokers has fallen from 28% of the adult population to 25%, during the period from 1998 to 2004. That is a reduction of 1,200,000 smokers. But why are they not telling us how this breaks down, so that we can compare 1998-2001 with 2001-2004, and clearly see the actual impact of NRT being made available on prescription? There are huge amounts of money involved, where is the evidence it is not being wasted?

Some of the ongoing reduction in smoking is due to the fact that tobacco is becoming increasingly unfashionable - simply a continuation of the falling trend in tobacco use since 1948, when records began. According to a 2007 factsheet published by ASH:

After 1982, the rate of decline slowed, with prevalence falling by only about one percentage point every two years until 1990, since when it levelled out. However, an analysis of data taken from the Government’s monthly Omnibus survey demonstrated that between 1999 and 2002 there was a decline in adult smoking of around 0.4% per annum. This rate of decline has continued.

This document is dated March 2007. It vaguely suggests that the rate of decline has remained at 0.4% since 1999, does it not? But that is not good, is it? Because it also says that between 1982 and 1990, the rate of decline was 1% every two years, which of course is 0.5% annually. This indicates that not only has the rate of decline slowed since the 1980s, but also that the 0.4% decline has not changed since 1999. This despite the British government making NRT available on prescription from March 2001, at massive cost to the UK taxpayer. Are we to conclude from these figures that Government sponsoring of NRT has made absolutely no difference to the general, oh-so-gradual reduction in smoking prevalence over the last six years? In the same ASH article, under the sub-heading Cigarette smoking and age there is a hint at this:

Between 2004 and 2005 the only age group to record a fall in smoking prevalence was the 35-49 age group.

This means that the two million NRT prescriptions dispensed during 2004, worth a total value of £44 million according to the DoH - and all the NRT products bought privately as well, from supermarkets, pharmacies, petrol stations and similar outlets in that year, at a cost to consumers of God only knows how much - made zero impact upon the number of smokers in the UK outside of the 35-49 age group. Perhaps the people who approved Nicotine Replacement as a medication in the first place would like to explain that. And all those who recommended that it should be made available on prescription at the taxpayers’ expense. Perhaps the BMA would like to comment. Perhaps ASH would like to explain why they continue to recommend these products, given their own observations of its apparently total lack of effectiveness quoted above.

(excerpt 2 from Nicotine: The Drug That Never Was)

Here is the clearest piece of evidence yet, to indicate the absolute stupidity of NRT/Zyban and the NHS Stop Smoking Services. Again it comes from The Times article and it concerns one of the methods Dr. Milne used to try to predict future results:

“An alternative way of looking at the issue is to use established figures for how many people need to be treated with anti-smoking aids such as nicotine patches or the drug bupropion [Zyban] in order to achieve one long-term quitter - what doctors call the “numbers needed to treat”. Evidence indicates that for nicotine patches or gum, the figure is 17, and for bupropion it is 8.”

Now I’m no mathematician so you might want to get out your pocket calculators and check this out for yourselves, but I reckon that translates into a ’success’ rate of 12.5% for Zyban and 6% for NRT. Zyban cannot be prescribed without unpredictable risk that has already caused grave concern in dozens of cases. Many of my clients told me that they stopped using it because they were alarmed by the way it made them feel. And its success rate is half that of acupuncture, which has never harmed anybody.

The 6% quit rate for NRT reported here clearly shows that the Glasgow University review did indeed mean 15% remain quit, but without clarifying that as only about 7% of the total treated, for the obvious reason that they did not want to draw attention to a failure rate of 93%. Since 6% success is exactly the figure the Iowa study found for willpower alone, that more or less amounts to ZERO improvement with NRT - and in this instance the information is coming from the Deputy Medical Director of a Health Authority.

Of course they are missing their target, their method is useless and yet they are wasting millions on it annually. And this performance is comparable with earlier medical trials? What numbskull authorised the national implementation of that policy? Or perhaps we should ask “what Machiavellian political genius”, depending upon what they actually intended to achieve. So - what do you think, taxpayer? Ever get the feeling you’ve been had?

(excerpt 3 from Nicotine: The Drug That Never Was)

There may be some of you out there thinking: “So NRT has a very low success rate, so what? Tell us something we don’t know! At least a few people are helped, surely that’s something, isn’t it?”

But just consider this: if the government had been laying on sessions of acupuncture, or homeopathy through the NHS for vast numbers of smokers - spending hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money on that since 2001 instead of NRT, and it became established that 94% of that was a complete waste of money and willpower would have achieved the same results anyway - would you expect the government to continue with that policy once they knew the results were as poor as that? How could they possibly justify it?

Yet this is exactly what has happened with NRT. And they know! These are government statistics from the Department of Health, and every month I seem to stumble upon more research turning up the same figures, some of it going back years. Like this for example, quoted in a book published in 2002:

Schneider et al showed that mere dispensing of nicotine gum actually resulted in a lower quit rate with active gum than with placebo treatment (8% nicotine gum, 13% placebo gum)… Of course most patients simply buy and apply the patches like sticking plaster. Without any behavioural help, we can therefore expect very low quit rates with the nicotine patch (according to Allen V. Prochazka in his article New Developments in Smoking Cessation, in the order of 5 per cent).

From Don’t Stop Smoking Until You’ve Read This Book,

Dr Harry Adler and Dr Karl Morris, How to Books 2002

Now just let me remind you once again about that press release from the Department of Health for April to September 2003, which informed the public that 68,600 people using NRT during that period had:

“successfully quit (based on self-report), 53% of those setting a quit date”.

The difference between 53% and 5% is so enormous that this amounts to seriously misleading the public about the effectiveness of these services.

Taxpayers’ money is taxpayers’ money, it doesn’t belong to the government. The government cannot just give it away to drug companies or throw it away on projects that obviously don’t work without having to account for it in an honest and straightforward way. And whatever genuine mistakes may have been made at the start, to continue with nicotine-based products now that the abysmal results are an established fact is impossible to justify and would simply amount to corruption. It has to be scrapped without delay.

Evidence F - Other endorsements of hypnotherapy

Excerpt from Nicotine: The Drug That Never Was

If you are more prone to getting a cold when you are stressed, you will know that your state of mind can affect your body - and the effect can work for good or bad. Work by Dr Steven Greer at the Royal Marsden Hospital has demonstrated that cancer sufferers who displayed a “fighting spirit” were 60% more likely to be alive 13 years after diagnosis than those who felt “helpless and hopeless”.

In a recent study at Imperial College, London, patients with chronic genital herpes that did not respond to medicine were taught to practice self-hypnosis three times a week for six weeks. “The recurrence rate of the condition halved, which is a phenomenal result in these severe cases,” says John Gruzelier, Professor of Psychology at Imperial. “We looked to see what happened when we injected a blood sample with the virus before and after the self-hypnosis training. After training, the cytotoxic [cell-destroying] effect of the body’s natural killer cells stepped up immensely in two thirds of the group.”

The study of psychoneuroimmunology is in its infancy, but it is thought that the brain can reverse disease via a group of neurotransmitters called neuropeptides. These are triggered by the physiological equivalent of feelings and thoughts, and can lock onto cells all over the body. One is endorphin, the “feel-good” effect released by strenuous exercise. Others can boost the production of killer cells and lymphocytes and reduce levels of cortisol, all of which can strengthen the immune system.

“The potential for mind-body medicine is enormous,” says Professor Gruzelier, who is about to embark on trials of self-hypnosis for advanced breast cancer and early-stage HIV. “It’s non-invasive, easy to teach and to do, and very cost-effective.”

Healing can be all in the mind article, Daily Telegraph 25.10.02

 

Stop Press: Hypnotherapy Discovered by Medics in 21^st Century!

The potential for mind-body medicine has been enormous for the last 150 years, ever since those wonderful pioneers began experimenting with mesmerism/hypnosis for anaesthesia and getting very exciting results (see Hypnotherapy v Science, Section 17 Volume II), just like the exciting results described above. Perhaps you are beginning to wonder why mind-body medicine is described by this worthy reporter at the Telegraph as being “in its infancy” a century and a half later. And the medical folk can call it psychoneuroimmunology if they like, but it is actually hypnotherapy, as the words “self-hypnosis” do rather give away in the study at Imperial College. It is just that if the medical world call it hypnotherapy, they begin to look a bit stupid for being generally prejudiced against it for a century and a half. But if they call it psychoneuroimmunology, then the psychology professors can do what Allen Carr did: re-package hypnosis under a different name and claim the wonderful successes of hypnotherapy for themselves as if they just ‘discovered’ it.

Well I’ve got news for you, guys: it was never lost. And it has always been the medical authorities that have gone out of their way to make sure people like myself are not allowed to claim we might be able to help with medical problems just like those listed above, which nevertheless respond astonishingly well to the placebo effect - which is nothing but suggestion.

The medical profession owes the hypnotherapy profession the biggest professional apology in the world. That’s the truth. But we won’t hold our collective breath. We’ll just keep doing what we do best - glad you found the time to catch up eventually. But don’t go acting as if you’ve suddenly discovered some marvellous new branch of science - go back a century and a half and read your medical history. Look at what your predecessors did to the mesmerists in your own profession, and hang your heads in shame. Psychoneuroimmunology, hypnosis, mind-body medicine, mesmerism… as the bard said, “what’s in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet”. Revenge is sweet, they say… and to those of us who feel furious about what happened to the medical mesmerists because it was so stupid, unnecessary and so unfair… yes, it is sweet to read the words of Professor Gruzelier, and to know that despite all the prejudice, lies and hostility that was directed at advocates of these methods in the past, despite all the horseshit from the pathological disbelievers in the medical profession, hypnotherapy has, of course, come up smelling of roses.

I’ll let Barbara Lantin have the last word regarding placebos for the moment because later, when we are looking at the actual failure rates of nicotine replacement products I would like this statement to be easily recalled:

The placebo effect is a powerful medicinal tool: in an average drug trial, 35 per cent of patients receiving dummy pills show an improvement in their symptoms.

35%. Let us plant that figure firmly in the Subconscious mind and stick a big flag over it saying “Placebo: 35%”. Now you will always be able to remember, and at any time in the future - perhaps at a dinner party - if someone is being dismissive, saying “Oh, that’s just a placebo!” you can coolly remark:

“Actually, in scientific trials the placebo effect can normally be expected to have a success rate of anything up to 35%.” All will be impressed.

What was the long-term success-rate of NRT again?  Oh yes, 7.8%  Which means it functions very poorly even as a placebo.  With the unusual drawback, as placebos go, of also being highly poisonous.  Comparable with earlier clinical trials, too. Oh dear.

Evidence G

Claims for hypnotherapy success which come from the therapist are no more than you would expect from any therapist, but independent endorsements are a different matter. Over the years I have received many, but here I am only going to include a few. One of these is from a corporate client, Keoghs Solicitors in Bolton, who had about 280 staff at the time. They engaged my services in early 2003 for a Well Being At Work initiative, which was supposed to be a post-Christmas, New Year's Resolutions sort of thing, but the hypnotherapy part of that became such a success that it ran for years.

The four documents reproduced here are: The original Keoghs press release, a fraction of the reams of feedback we collected, the reference Keoghs gave me towards the end of the programme (around 2005), and a message from the then Head of Human Resources dated December 2006, still enthusiastic about my services three years later, proving the lasting benefits of hypnotherapy.

Just to remind people that we don't just help people stop smoking, I've included a couple of other messages too, that are typical of the sort of thanks I get all the time.

If you require further evidence that current UK smoking policy wastes huge resources on a poison and effectively condemns thousands to illness and death, when hypnotherapy and acupuncture could do so much better, why not download the book?

If you don't need any more evidence, can you help to make more people aware of this? Spread the word! The Poison Factory production line must be stopped!