NHS: Scrap NRT NOW!!

Since 2001 the UK government has spent hundreds of millions of pounds every year on the free or subsidised provision of NRT through the NHS. Many scientific studies have shown that willpower alone produces a long-term stop smoking success rate of anywhere between 2% and 8%. In 2005 the government learned from the Borland Report that NHS Smoking Cessation Services had a long-term success rate of just 6.5%. It doesn’t work at all.

by Chris Holmes

Nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) was originally passed as if it were an effective medication on the basis of its performance at just six weeks.

Since 2001 the UK government has spent hundreds of millions of pounds every year on the free or subsidised provision of NRT through the NHS.

Many scientific studies have shown that willpower alone produces a long-term stop smoking success rate of anywhere between 2% and 8%.

In 2005 the government learned from the Borland Report that NHS Smoking Cessation Services had a long-term success rate of just 6.5%. This is well within the normal placebo range, proving that those methods don’t work.

Promoters of NRT then adopted the fraudulent tactic of selecting only trial studies with a particularly low success rate for willpower – such as 2% – for comparison with NHS Services, to make it look as if the 6.5% figure boosts smokers’ chances of success.

The Borland Report did the same thing: slyly comparing the success rate of smokers trying to quit with their doctor’s help (2.6%) with those going to the hugely expensive NHS Smoking Cessation Services (6.5%) and concluding: “Where suitable services exist, we recommend that referral [to NHS S.C.S.] become the normal strategy for management of smoking cessation in general practice.”

The Royal College of Physicians have actually argued that 6.5% is “cost effective” if you treat million of smokers, because then, even that puny percentage would clock up a few hundred thousand successes!  Barmy, eh?  Never mind the fact that we needn’t spend a dime on NRT because willpower clocks up the same result anyway.

In 2007 I published Nicotine: The Drug That Never Was (Volume I) – a book that blew the whistle on the NRT scam.

In 2009 I published the second volume, and meanwhile the cost of NHS Smoking Cessation Services rose to £84,000,000.  Just for that one year.

In 2010 my original claim that smokers’ cravings have nothing to do with nicotine was confirmed by research at the University of Tel Aviv.

In January 2012 my original claim that NRT has NO benefit was confirmed by research at the University of Harvard.

The Truth Will Out Campaign has been calling for the NHS to drop NRT since March 2008 because it doesn’t work at all.  The science backs this campaign but the BMA, the Department of Health, the MHRA, A.S.H. and N.I.C.E. all continue to recommend nicotine replacement products and public funding for them.  They are wilfully ignoring the facts.

My books made three controversial claims.  The first two claims have now been independently verified.  The third – that nicotine is not a drug at all, and that smoking is not drug taking – will inevitably be verified as well because it is all true.  But how many smokers have died since 2007?  More than half a million in the UK alone.  How many of them tried NRT on the advice of government and medical authorities, unknowingly wasting their precious time?

How much NHS cash has been wasted already on these bogus products since 2001?  Anybody’s guess, but since the Borland Report first gave the Blair government the bad news in 2005, it will certainly have topped £500,000,000 just in the UK.

IF YOU BELIEVE THAT THE CASH SHOULD BE DIVERTED NOW TO OPERATIONS AND EQUIPMENT THAT ACTUALLY WORK, PLEASE SHARE THIS PAGE ON TWITTER, FACEBOOK, ANYWHERE… NRT is a massive global con and YOU are paying for it.

Expensive Life-Saving Drugs: Would £84m-a-year extra cash help?

The NHS could easily afford more life-saving drugs if it just stopped wasting vast amounts of cash on nicotine replacement therapies that don’t work any better than willpower in the long run, as the Borland Report clearly demonstrated in 2005.

by Chris Holmes

Primary Care Trusts are “failing in their duty of care” in blacklisting 19 drugs on the basis of cost alone, according to a report this week in the Metro newspaper (Thursday 24th November, page 8).  Political Editor John Higginson reports that this “appears to go against the NHS constitution, which gives patients the right to receive any drug recommended by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence if their doctor believes it is clinically appropriate.”

The list includes drugs with proven efficacy in the treatment of cancer and also epilepsy – but the PCTs concerned have decided that these drugs cost too much.

The very same Primary Care Trusts also decided it was perfectly okay to spend £84,000,000 in England alone last year (not the whole of the UK, that figure is even higher) on a treatment service which they know from their own research DOES NOT WORK any better than willpower alone when the results are assessed at one year.  I’m talking about the NHS Stop Smoking Services and particularly the nicotine replacement products which we now know for sure have a 6% success rate at the 12 month stage – exactly the same as willpower.

My suggestion is simple: Take that vast amount of money and spend it on life-saving drug therapies that have been proven to be effective, and leave smoking cessation to experts like myself.  I’m a hypnotherapist by the way, and nearly all my smoking clients have already tried willpower, nicotine gum, patches, lozenges, the little inhalator-thingy… some have tried Zyban and the latest (non) wonder drug Champix… then they come to me, convinced that they “have failed” repeatedly and that it is “really hard to stop smoking”!  No, it’s really hard if you try to do it via the NHS.  It’s really easy with hypnotherapy, provided it’s done well.

But I’m not suggesting the PCTs should fund that.  They should be funding those life-saving drugs, not wasting tens of millions every single year on a service that clearly doesn’t work at all.

the book that blew the whistle on the nicotine scam

Free Poison Patches From Your Friendly Pharmacist!

The defenders of this policy are now reduced to sheer bluff to fool the public, and this is how they do it. Any spokesperson from ASH, the NHS or the DoH will always begin by telling you how many people are killed by smoking every year – as if that fact had any bearing whatever on the performance of those services and products! It is a smokescreen (no pun intended), to give you the impression that this is so serious a problem that SOMETHING MUST BE DONE – even if it makes no difference whatever and costs a fortune.

…courtesy of the U.K. taxpayer, of course… the latest mad idea for wasting NHS cash, have you heard about this one? Free patches from the chemist for 1 week “to help smokers with their New Years Resolutions”! This despite the fact that numerous scientific reports into the long-term results for NRT prove it is no more successful than willpower alone, with a success range of 2% to 8% – all well within the normal placebo range, and therefore utterly useless. And it’s free only for a week, which is obviously no different from a free sachet of shampoo given away with a magazine. Since when is the U.K. taxpayer supposed to be footing the bill for free samples of useless drug company products? This would be a scandalous waste of precious resources even if there were public money to burn, but as it is… I mean, how many kidney dialysis machines could be bought for that, eh? It’s MENTAL.

Now, quite which government should have their soft, delicate parts jammed in a vice for this piece of out-and-out idiocy, I’m not too sure! Seems a bit soon to have been dreamt up by the new Lib/Con pact, so I suspect this may have been a last gasp of Gordon Brown lunacy but what really made me feel like throwing the sofa through the TV screen last night as this was announced on the BBC Evening News was the appearance of Deborah Arnott from A.S.H. (Action on Smoking & Health) describing this latest cash donation to drug company coffers as “brilliant”. If that moronic marketing ploy is brilliant, Arnott, my wee dog’s an astronomer.

Deborah Arnott’s only reservation, fellow taxpayers, is that it doesn’t go on for long enough. Yeah, you would say that, wouldn’t you Deborah?

Cash In On Smoking And Health

When will the BBC twig that A.S.H. are not REALLY a “Public Health Charity”, which is what they purport to be. If they were, then their decisions and actions would have smokers’ interests at their heart first and foremost, would they not? Yet this was proven to be completely untrue back when Allen Carr died, and Deborah Arnott claimed that specific success rates quoted by Allen Carr’s Easyway International Group were “plucked out of the air” and “basically made up.” Her comments referred to two independent studies conducted by eminent experts in the field of smoking cessation which had already been published in peer reviewed journals indicating a 53% success rate for Allen Carr’s Easyway to Stop Smoking Clinics after 12 months. She made these comments whilst on the BBC Radio 4’s “P.M.” programme during a piece looking back on the achievements of Allen Carr. The Easyway Organisation sued, and won because Arnott was completely wrong about that. A.S.H. were forced to make a public apology and pay costs. So, did that make the “public health charity” see the error of its ways, and start promoting Allen Carr’s now-proven method too, and not just drug company products?

No. They just published the obligatory apology and then continued to completely ignore the Allen Carr method, which proves what I, the Easyway Organisation and many others have been saying for years: that ASH is just a shop window for nicotine gum, patches, Zyban and Champix, and it has sod-all to do with public health! It’s just shameless promotion of largely-useless quit products dressed up as “healthcare”.

The Scandalous Strategy

You see, here’s how it works. Nicotine Replacement Poisoning was originally passed as if it were an effective quit smoking aid on the basis of its performance at just SIX WEEKS. The manufacturers were even allowed to put the performance rate at six weeks on the packaging, as if it were indicative of the actual long-term outcome, which it certainly is not. The NHS and the Department of Health currently measure the ‘effectiveness’ of the NHS Stop Smoking Services by the results at four weeks, and then stop following up. Using this clearly-inadequate evaluation method, they have routinely boasted ‘success rates’ of 55% (average around the country) rising as high as 90% in the case of South West Kent PCT (see document reproduced in the Evidence section of this website). Long-term results are never mentioned when these very short-term results are being trumpeted to promote the services, which is grossly misleading.

Yet we now know for sure – having examined the scientific reports into the long-term NHS results that we EVENTUALLY managed to get out of the DoH – that the real outcomes at one year are a miserable 2% – 8%, no different from willpower alone!

The defenders of this policy are now reduced to sheer bluff to fool the public, and this is how they do it. Any spokesperson from ASH, the NHS or the DoH will always begin by telling you how many people are killed by smoking every year – as if that fact had any bearing whatever on the performance of those services and products! It is a smokescreen (no pun intended), to give you the impression that this is so serious a problem that SOMETHING MUST BE DONE – even if it makes no difference whatever and costs a fortune. Then they will blithely assure you that “numerous scientific studies have shown…”, but without letting slip that those were all short-term studies and they create a very false impression. The long-term studies they will not mention at all, except perhaps the Ferguson report, which artificially manufactured a 15% success rate at one year by cherry picking: excluding 20% of the 1039 participants from the final evaluation on the basis of socio-economic factors. In other words, they excluded all those they thought were least likely to quit before they evaluated the results, making a nonsense of that 15% figure!

All this would be quite funny if it were not a massive waste of precious NHS resources, and a shameful waste of smokers’ time, encouraging them to bugger about with bogus products that don’t do anything useful really. No-one knows how much time any individual smoker has got, so wasting any of it is potentially life-threatening, Doc.

ASH & Co – and the BMA, the DoH, the Royal College of Physicians, people like Edzard Ernst et al. – are always banging on in a very smug and pompous fashion about EBM: “evidence-based medicines” which the rest of us know as “drug company products”. Yet we can see from all this that it doesn’t matter what the evidence actually IS! Again, it’s just a marketing ploy: evidence about Allen Carr’s genuine and very respectable SUCCESS is ignored by ASH, yet the clear evidence of NRT abject failure is also ignored, they continue to promote that by sneakily substituting very short-term evaluations to mislead smokers and taxpayers alike.

This is a national scandal. The plug should be pulled immediately and there should be a public enquiry into who is responsible for this outrageous attempt to hoodwink everyone. If those millions were being spent on something like a herbal remedy – something NOT manufactured by a drug company – and it showed a 94% failure rate, the very same people who are defending current the NHS policy would be screaming for the funding to be stopped immediately, and everybody knows it! How long is this madness going to be allowed to continue? I’ve been saying this now for THREE YEARS, and in that time the number of smokers attempting to quit has halved, but the amounts of public money being poured into this farcical NHS pantomime has rocketed from £51 million pounds a year to £84 million last year. Those resources should be spent on things the NHS is actually GOOD AT, and smoking cessation certainly isn’t one of those things, as the science shows very clearly now.

If that is not grounds for a public enquiry, I’d like to know what is!

the book that blew the whistle on the nicotine scam

safer, more effective alternative

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”. Independent corroboration of those facts here.

Notice how Amanda Sandford from Cash In On Smoking And Health (A.S.H.) tries to suggest that there is convincing evidence to the contrary. This is because A.S.H. is operating entirely to support drug company products in the smoking cessation field, that is all they do. They hammer on and on about “nicotine addiction” and got into legal trouble when they tried to rubbish success claims for the Allen Carr (non-drug) method. None of the drug company products have ever achieved the success rate that Allen Carr’s Easyway International Group proved in court (53%), and A.S.H. were forced to apologise and pay Easyway’s costs, YET THEY DO NOT ENDORSE THE EASYWAY METHOD – which proves they are not really a “public health charity” but a shop window for the drug companies posing as a public health charity.

Sandford claims that:

“…studies into the benefits of nicotine patches and gums were ‘robust’ and that ‘all the evidence points to relying on willpower alone is not terribly successful.”

The unnamed Department of Health spokeman claimed that the Sydney University team’s anaylsis of 511 studies was:

“…inconsistent with a very well established evidence-base. Smokers that attempt to quit without assistance are significantly less likely to quit successfully than those who quit with support. The unsupported quit rate is around 4 per cent at one year. This is doubled when a smoker uses stop smoking medicines, and quadrupled when a smoker uses the NHS Stop Smoking Services – where smokers get both medicine and behavioural support.”

This is simply untrue. The claim of a 15% success rate which originates from the Fergusson report and is the supposed basis for the “four times more likely to succeed” slogan was only achieved by a process of cherry picking, weeding out all the participants that the report’s authors thought less likely to succeed because of socio-economic factors. That is bogus. The Borland report, on the other hand, found only a 6.5% success rate at one year follow up for NHS Smoking Cessation Services. Figures for willpower alone we have seen through several reports oscillate between 4% and 8%. In other words, the methods employed by the NHS Stop Smoking Services are an unjustifiable waste of precious public resources and must be scrapped. The Truth Will Out Campaign entirely agrees with this statement:

“Simon Chapman, a professor of public health, said that governments were also guilty of medicalising smoking cessation and of making giving up sound harder than it actually is.”

Yes, and so are A.S.H. The fact is, they don’t WANT you to quit. They want you to smoke, then try the gum, then smoke, then try the patches, then smoke, then try the lozenges, then smoke, then try the micro-tab, then smoke, then try the inhalator-thingy…

Quit Smoking In One Session With Hypnotherapy!

Of course I believe the money would be better spent on hypnotherapy based on my own experience as a hypnotherapist over the last decade, and also the evidence reproduced in the book and on this site. However I am no longer under any illusion that evidence will change these things. The opposition to change is ideological and has far more to do with money, power and influence than it has to do with evidence.

No, the thing which will really force a change is the fact that there isn’t any money – not for hypnotherapy, not for nicotine replacement poisoning, not for the Champix Suicide Pills, not for that freaky Zyban (it’s an anti-depressant! No it’s not, it’s an anti-smoking pill! No it’s not, it’s a cure for hiccups! No wait, it’s…)

There’s no money for any of it. All sorts of things are going to be cut, but the things that will be cut first are the ones that don’t work anyway, and EVERYBODY KNOWS THAT N.R.T. DOESN’T BLOODY WORK! And Champix is killing people, and damaging a lot more. Scrap the lot! Stop wasting prescious NHS resources on this bullshit!

Advertising Standards Slam Bogus NHS Claim

The Advertising Standards Agency block an attempt by the NHS to suggest in a promotional leaflet that smokers are “twice as likely” to stop smoking with NRT and “four times more likely” with NHS Stop Smoking Services because the claims are “misleading”.

by Chris Holmes

The Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) have blocked an NHS advertising leaflet which claimed that smokers were “twice as likely” to quit with Nicotine Replacement products and “four times as likely” to quit if they also used NHS Stop Smoking Services. For the very first time since the Truth Will Out Campaign was launched, the claims have been rejected because quitting success implies a permanent solution but the NHS were relying on the results at only four weeks, which the agency concluded was not the same thing at all, and was therefore likely to mislead the public.

I’ll say it is. And since we now know from the Borland report that the results dwindle to 6% success at the end of twelve months, which is the same result as a number of studies have found for willpower alone, we feel vindicated in claiming that NRT doesn’t work at all in the long run, and is therefore a complete waste of taxpayers’ money and the NHS should abandon it altogether. Instead they’re going to waste more valuable resources printing up leaflets that say something like: “Did you know that nicotine skin patches and chewing gum can be effective in aiding withdrawal from nicotine?” (The bit in bold type is a direct quote from the British Medical Association’s Illustrated Medical Dictionary, Dorling Kindersley 2002.)  And now over to the March Hare, for the weather…

Here’s the link to the ASA story:

The Argus

**Update, January 2012: Harvard University publish a study that demonstrates NO USEFUL EFFECT from any form of NRT.  Just as I said in the book in 2007, and on this site from March 2008.

Hypnotherapy is the easiest way of all to quit smoking, and despite the best efforts of Edzard Ernst to suggest otherwise, we will establish this as scientific fact and common knowledge in the end.  The sooner the better.  Nicotine: The Drug That Never Was fully explains the reasons for the complete failure of the medical approach and exactly how hypnotherapy wipes out compulsive habits like smoking, usually in a single session. As it says in the book, there is no such thing as “therapeutic nicotine”. Give it up, Doc.

more info about hypnotherapy for smoking cessation

Corruption at the Department of Health

“Evidence-based medicine” is shown to be a hollow phrase when the evidence from the Borland report shows that Nicotine Replacement products and willpower alone have exactly the same long term outcome. January 2012: Harvard University confirm Truth Will Out’s claim that NRT does not help smokers at all in any form.

by Chris Holmes

President Barack Obama said today: “Where there is inefficiency, where there is corruption, we expect those people to be held accountable.”

That is a fine democratic principle.  Well said, Mr President.  Of course he was talking about the government of Afghanistan, warning those people that they could not expect continued support from Western governments if they did not root out corruption wherever it is identified.

I take it, then, that President Obama would recommend the same remedial action to be taken within the U.S. administration and indeed their counterparts in the UK government, wherever it can be clearly shown that inefficiency and corruption are wasting valuable resources and attempts are made to conceal this, rather than rectify it.

Nicotine Replacement Therapy doesn’t work at all in the long term according to the government’s own research.  Already, following the press release in July this year from the smokers’ rights group Freedom2Choose which cited my research demonstrating clearly that the NHS advertising claim that smokers are “four times more likely to succeed” by using those services was actually false, we note that in the latest TV campaign promoting those services, the bogus claim has been quietly dropped!

This is not enough. Let me just remind you what the Borland report found when that group investigated the long term results of the NHS approach to smoking cessation at the 12 month interval:

What they found, at 12 month follow up, was that the in-practice treatment scored only 2.6% success at one year, whereas the Stop Smoking Services delivered a staggering 6.5%.  And then they actually had the temerity to officially conclude thus: “Where suitable services exist, we recommend that referral become the normal strategy for management of smoking cessation in general practice”.

Seriously folks, I ask you: is it possible to believe that anyone – any collective group of people – could be so unutterably stupid as to recommend the continuation of either of those approaches to smoking cessation, at the taxpayer’s expense, based on failure rates of 93.5% and 97.4% respectively?  Also, what happened to the supposed 15% success rate claimed by the Ferguson report?  Gone – reduced to 6.5% at best. This proves that the report was flawed and misleading and should never again be cited to market NRT products or NHS services.  No wonder they buried it.

Finally, if the 1992 University of Iowa report found 6% for willpower over very large sample numbers, as did Cohen (4%), then how is 6.5% “up to four times more likely to succeed”?

The fact is that it is not.

At the start of the Truth Will Out Campaign, I reported that smokers were being lied to about the effectiveness of these services and drug company products, and reproduced in the Evidence section of this site published NHS and DoH documents that claimed up to 90% success rates for short-term results (4 weeks), but did not report at all on long-term outcomes.  When they finally did, they claimed 15% success at one year, which I have now proved is also very misleading.

I said, right from the very beginning, that it was 94% failure.  Thank you Borland et al, you just officially confirmed it. (Reproduced from the blogpost Dept of Stealth 6)

These results do not indicate that smokers should be directed to the Smoking Cessation Services.  In fact they make it blindingly obvious that the whole sorry, stupid failure should be scrapped before any more valuable resources are wasted on it.  Any fool can see that, so before we start lecturing the Afghan government about corruption, we should take that fine democratic sentiment and use it to investigate the corruption at the heart of the British government, and the role of the global drug companies that are bleeding the NHS to death.

If you agree, link up – spread the word.  Let’s end it!  Where are the bloody investigative journalists these days?  Wake up, Health Editors!  THIS IS A SCANDAL!

*Update 15.01.10
Apparently in some NRT promotions this New Year the ‘Four Times More Likely To Succeed’ claim is still being used. This is not “evidence-based medicine”, unless of course the DoH and the MHRA are going to cynically attach that label to any officially approved medicines REGARDLESS of what the evidence actually is.

Hear that trickling sound, Doc? That’s the sound of your credibility steadily draining away. You’ll miss it when it’s gone.

**Update, January 2012: Harvard University report that NRT does not help smokers quit in any way.  August 2011 Tel Aviv University study confirms that smokers’ cravings have nothing to do with nicotine and that smoking is a habit, not a drug addiction – exactly what I said four years earlier when I first published:

Nicotine: The Drug That Never Was

Central Hypnotherapy

Drug-taking versus Therapy

You are suggesting that Champix is attractive because you only pay a prescription fee. For many people that may turn out to be true. But over the last two years I have been told of many people who have paid a much higher price. Some of them are dead. So what you are suggesting only remains a valid conclusion if none of that happens to you personally.

by Chris Holmes

In response to the post Champix Kills, But Don’t Tell The Smokers a comment came in from James which raised a number of important points, so I have decided to reproduce it here, along with my response to the points he raised:

JAMES on October 27th, 2009 at 7:11 am Said:

I am in two minds regarding Champix. I have many friends who have taken it, the majority have stopped smoking for good (so far). One had a bad reaction and had to stop the course. Depression.

I will be getting the pills tonight and I am optimistic about them. Even though I have read many, many of the horror stories surrounding the drug, I have read many, many, many more that support its use from satisfied patients.

I suggest having a look through this forum: http://www.netdoctor.co.uk/interactive/discussion/viewtopic.php?t=6901&f=11&postdays=0&start=1

There are many people on there who are using/used the drug, detailing all their side effects and most of them come out on top, even after suffering the more drastic ones such as depression. Funny that, I don’t think a single one ever mentioned “suicidal tendencies or thoughts”. I don’t deny this, but when it comes down to either Tobacco companies generating insane amounts of revenue at the cost of my health, or a Chemical company offering me something with a 20% (based on your figure) success rate of quitting smoking that has many people praising, or spending hundreds of pounds on hypnotherapy.. I’m going with the pill.

The one thing I DO agree with, is that the NHS / Health Associations are all corrupt. I read Alan Carr’s book, which helped me stop smoking for 6 months previously. Reading it again does not have the same appeal, naturally, but his points do stand. If the NHS actually thought for themselves, or did some research, they really would find out that hypnotherapy is far more successful than NRT, although the costs of such would not necessarily benefit them. I imagine hypnotherapy is more expensive than patches!!

It does not suprise me that hypnotherapists are very anti-champix, as naturally, it is one-side fighting for revenue against another. Saving lives is the most important, but this can really split peoples trusts.

Needless to say, I will be taking Champix, I am aware of the risks and will keep an eye on my mental state very closely (along with the help of others). If I don’t quit using it, I cannot afford hypnotherapy. Therefore, its either the cigarettes or the Champix that will no doubt, one day kill me.

Even though you have your own ideas about Champix already, and can back them up, if it helps 20% of smokers to become non-smokers, then withdrawing it is a BIG mistake.
Those 20% who do quit with it, may not be able to afford the several-hundred pounds cost of hypnotherapy (based on last time I checked a session at an Alan Carr clinic). You could be giving them a death-sentence, if they continued to smoke.

Smoking is expensive enough, I’ll take my chances with a prescription fee ;)

James

P.S.. Interesting read, nonetheless!!

CHRIS on October 28th, 2009 at 5:45am Said:

Hi James, thanks for your thoughts.

I had a look at the “netdoctor” site, and what struck me immediately was that nearly all the posts on the first page are from people on Day 1 or Day 3 of the course! These are “so far, so good” posts that many champix blogs are littered with, which create a totally false impression. That’s like someone sending you a text message that says they’re 12 minutes into their hypnotherapy session, and so far they haven’t wanted a cigarette! Only people who have been off the tablets for weeks or months can truly report their own experience as a success. Don’t forget, half the people in the original trials who were counted as successes were smoking again within 28 weeks.

Most of the horrific side effects have kicked in after weeks on the drug, so please don’t be falsely reassured by these early comments.

Who or What is netdoctor?

Down at the bottom of the homepage it says that netdoctor.co.uk is a trade mark. Is it? And what trade might that be, then? And do you suppose that the lack of posts reporting serious side effects might be because the site moderators think that those sort of reports might be bad for “trade”, so they don’t get approved for display on the site?

Hypnotherapy v. Champix?

I’m not against Champix simply because it is competition. If it were as straighforward as that I would be against the Allen Carr people and acupuncturists too, but as anyone can see from reading Truth Will Out, I am not – in fact I recommend them. I do claim hypnotherapy has the greatest success of the three, but then I back that up in the Evidence section. This site is all about evidence, and so is the book. You don’t have to buy the book to see that, because I publish a lot of it here for free.

The Relative Costs

Although I often state that the Allen Carr Easyway method is a form of hypnotherapy – which is true – it is not the best form by a long way. In fact I would suggest to anyone that the best version of the Allen Carr approach is to read the original book, the one that actually made him famous in the first place. The group sessions involve too many people, it complicates matters and brings down the overall success rate. The book is something you contemplate, and can return to – there are fewer distractions, just as in a one-to-one hypnotherapy session it is a more personal experience.

Please don’t assume hypnotherapy costs hundreds of pounds just because the Allen Carr franchises charge hundreds of pounds for their stop smoking sessions. I confidently regard myself as an expert in this field, but I only charge £120 for the Stop Smoking session I offer. I also have a reduced-fee back up session, so even those smokers who need two sessions – most do not – only pay £160 in total. Most smokers save that back in a month.

Now, some colleagues have suggested that I should charge more, and I certainly could charge more. But it is also true that some smokers – like yourself – would not choose hypnotherapy if I did that, so it would be the opposite of promoting the wider recognition of hypnotherapy as a therapeutic mode, something to which all professional hypnotherapists are supposed to be committed.

You are suggesting that Champix is attractive because you only pay a prescription fee. For many people that may turn out to be true. But over the last two years I have been told of many people who have paid a much higher price. Some of them are dead. So what you are suggesting only remains a valid conclusion if none of that happens to you personally. It is exactly the same “It won’t happen to me” assumption that many smokers adopt with regard to heart attacks and cancer – but in your case you have transferred it to Champix instead, accepting the suggestion that “it has to be better than dying of cancer”, as if those were the only choices! It’s a marketing suggestion and it apparently works very well, but it has a very hollow ring later for the unlucky ones.

Is it really about money? Those people who have posted their horror stories here and on other blogs, the ones who are terrified they will never feel normal, happy and healthy again – how much money would they pay to get their health back, or to be able to turn back the clock and never take the damn stuff in the first place?

How much did you pay for your last holiday? Was it £120? That was over in a flash, and now you have only your snapshots and your memories, but the benefits of stopping smoking last a lifetime.

What I am telling everyone is the truth, and I don’t just state it, I’m providing plenty of evidence and plenty of references so people can find out more – far more than the drug company lackeys are telling them. Then I am suggesting that you make an informed choice, and I think it is logical to try all the non-risk options first: hypnotherapy, the Allen Carr method and acupuncture have never harmed anyone, but they have certainly helped a lot of people to quit smoking.

In the context of your safety, your good health and the whole of the rest of your life, the investment in these non-risk approaches is peanuts, really! How much money do we burn up every year simply on our own idle entertainment?

I am only suggesting that the use of methods that have already harmed people should only be considered when all the safe methods have already been tried. You would think doctors would agree with that, wouldn’t you? As for the NHS funding hypnotherapy sessions for smoking cessation, HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!!!

Too many fingers in too many pies, my friend. The annual NHS bill for medications alone topped £10 billion some time ago, and it is rising still… do you really think the use of pharmaceuticals saves the NHS money?

It is killing the NHS. And we’ll see the end of the NHS before we see the end of the stranglehold the drug companies have over the medical profession. Hypnotherapists can’t stop it. Doctors can’t stop it. Even the drug companies can’t stop it, because they are in competition with other drug companies, and they have obligations to their shareholders. They have to sell more drugs, which means the NHS has to buy more drugs, which means people – such as yourself – have to take more drugs. They can’t have you going off to see a hypnotherapist – if everyone started doing that it would only mean one thing for drug companies: hard times. So of course they do everything in their power to steer you away from that, and netdoctor.co.uk is doing its bit there.

The question is, who do you trust? Those of us who have never hurt anyone but have helped thousands of people to safely stop smoking, or the people who have a long and apparently shameless history of killing and maiming tens of thousands of ‘unlucky ones’ with a whole list of nasty concoctions over the years, every one of which was mistakenly passed as “safe”?

Whatever you choose to do, James, I wish you well. Please do keep us posted about your progress.

*This exchange was four weeks ago.  So far James has not been back to tell us whether he did start taking Champix that night as he planned, or how the first four weeks went.

the safest quit smoking method is also the most successful

The Truth About Smoking

I first became fully aware that smoking was not a drug addiction six or seven years ago. My smoking clients would walk in to my office ‘unable’ to stop smoking, and walk out free. How could that be, if they really were addicted to, or dependent on, a drug called nicotine?
The answer was simple: they were not. Nor is it a ‘psychological addiction’ – a nonsense term, since the ‘logical’ part of the mind (the conscious mind) is not really involved. No, it is entirely a compulsive habit, and it can be easily eliminated by effective hypnotherapy – just like any other compulsive habit.

by Chris Holmes

I first became fully aware that smoking was not a drug addiction six or seven years ago. My smoking clients would walk in to my office ‘unable’ to stop smoking, and walk out free. How could that be, if they really were addicted to, or dependent on, a drug called nicotine?

The answer was simple: they were not. Nor is it a ‘psychological addiction’ – a nonsense term, since the ‘logical’ part of the mind (the conscious mind) is not really involved. No, it is entirely a compulsive habit, and it can be easily eliminated by effective hypnotherapy – just like any other compulsive habit. The medical people who insist otherwise are either ignorant of the reality – which is bad, since they are handing out advice and products based on that ignorant notion – or they know that ‘nicotine addiction’ is bogus, but they don’t want the public to realise it, which is far worse.

I knew that before I could challenge the pharmaceutical giants, the medical authorities and the Department of Health here in the U.K., I would have to assemble some pretty damning evidence and get it out there where they cannot suppress it, so that is what I’ve done. The first stage was to write and publish the bookNicotine: The Drug That Never Was.

Then I went to the newspapers. Initially I just sent them information, assuming one of them would sense a story and get back to me for more details. I sent detailed information to news and media organisations, and kept a record of all those I have alerted so far. In truth I saw this as the first wave, I wasn’t expecting much from it, because everybody’s immediate knee-jerk reaction is “Huh? Nicotine isn’t a drug? Who’s this idiot?”

The local paper (Stockport Express) did do an article though, and my email address was published with it. I fully expected a backlash from medical people – GPs, pharmacists, people who work for the NHS Stop Smoking Services. It was inconceivable they didn’t hear about it, it was in papers that were delivered to thousands of homes in the Stockport area. Here I was, calling for NRT to be scrapped by the NHS, declaring that it doesn’t work for 94% of smokers. You would think that someone would be standing up for NRT, saying: “How dare you, who do you think you are?” etc, but no. Not a word, the silence was deafening.

Recently I mentioned this to one of my clients, who is a nurse. She shook her head, and said: “They won’t. They know.”

This rather telling comment implies that the only reason the medical profession has not abandoned Nicotine Replacement Poisoning is because to do so now – after recommending and endorsing it for so long, and wasting vast sums of public money on it (though, to be fair, that was a government decision) – would be an embarrassing U-turn they would rather avoid.  So to avoid admitting that they were wrong, they are quite prepared to let thousands of smokers die by sticking to a failed policy, and waste vast sums of cash, that could actually be saving lives elsewhere, on the pointless production of a poison which has no genuine therapeutic application whatsoever, and performs very poorly even within the normal placebo range.

Chris Holmes has been Director of Central Hypnotherapy, Stockport, England UK since August 2000
hypnotherapy info

Site Launch!

This campaign is not attacking the medical profession. It is attacking the cosy collusion between medical authorities, the pharmaceutical industry and also the Department of Health, because they are all actively promoting methods that fail the vast majority of smokers, misrepresenting the facts and telling lies about alternative methods like hypnotherapy and acupuncture – all of which is costing lives and wasting resources.

by Chris Holmes

Well now, this should be interesting. It’s not every day a humble therapist takes on the pharmaceutical industry, the Department of Health, the B.M.A. and the Royal College of Physicians… but it has got to be done.

The book was the first step: that had to be written and published initially so that anyone in the world could get hold of a copy and assess the evidence for themselves. I couldn’t just come out and say: “Actually, the whole basis for Nicotine Replacement is false, which explains its abject failure!” …because nobody would have listened. Everyone would assume that it must have been properly tested, surely, in well-designed scientific trials?

Then again, you could just ask yourself: “Who has any faith in nicotine gum these days, really?” And of course, we now know that clinical trials ain’t what they used to be, and the whole process of getting products approved as medicines has been hijacked by the drug companies, who now run all the clinical trials themselves and tend to be very selective about the ‘evidence’ they present to approval bodies.

I challenge anyone – anyone with an open mind, that is – to read the evidence on this site and tell me they are quite happy to have their tax money squandered on the poison nicotine for a few more years. The Department of Health has got the NHS Stop Smoking Services proclaiming ‘success rates’ that bear no relation to the real, long term outcomes – and they know it! They just don’t want the public to know it.

I am quite sure there will be many people working in the healthcare system who will be in full agreement that precious NHS resources should not be wasted on a poison posing as a medication, just because the manufacturers managed to swing it in such a way that the very short-term results were passed off as the real results. That’s bogus, and if you turn a blind eye to things like that, you can hardly be surprised when you later see embarrassing headlines like the ones posted on this site (see Trust me, I’m a Doctor). And if you find yourself doubting that nicotine products could possibly have won approval in that way, you really should read the Daily Mail article there by leading psychiatrist Professor David Healy from February 2007, which is reproduced in that section of the site. In fact everyone should read that, before they allow their doctor to precribe them any new “wonder drug”.

This campaign is not attacking the medical profession. It is attacking the cosy collusion between medical authorities, the pharmaceutical industry and also the Department of Health, because they are all actively promoting methods that fail the vast majority of smokers, misrepresenting the facts and telling lies about alternative methods like hypnotherapy and acupuncture – all of which is costing lives and wasting resources. And all because they don’t want to admit they were wrong, which is a pretty pathetic reason to carry on like that. Or to maintain the status quo because it suits all three parties, which is worse, since it maintains at enormous human cost.

So if you find yourself in agreement with the Truth Will Out Campaign, please help by spreading the word in any way you can! This Campaign is opposed to any kind of violence, intimidation or criminal damage in pursuit of its aims – this is an information war, challenging misinformation and the covering-up of failure on a massive scale. On behalf of smokers everywhere, we welcome all genuine assistance in spreading the word! The Truth Will Out!

the book that blew the whistle on the nicotine scam

hypnotherapy info