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.

the hypnotherapy alternative

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.