Killer Chantix Champix Isn’t Magic

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.*

The weird and wonderful internet just threw up another amusing splinter of craziness in the form of an email message, sent through the Truth Will Out Contact Form facility, from a website called ChampixMagic.  It purported to be from a person called Jay, and it said:

Jay wrote:
Dear sir/webmaster,
I am the responsible person for link exchange at chantixmagic.com  I visited your site and feel, it’s a quality one and relevant to my site theme. So I hope that you would consider link exchange with us. If you determine that a link to our site is appropriate, Please let me know whether you are interested or not. If yes please provide your site info.

I find it very hard to believe that Jay has ever visited the Truth Will Out site.  I think it is much more probable that this message is sent out automatically to any site that mentions Champix a lot.  There follows here an excerpt from one of my earlier posts that mentioned it under the heading CHANTIX CHAMPIX KILLS, BUT A.S.H. WON’T TELL THE SMOKERS, and it also mentions the ChampixMagic site:

Now look at this, which purports to be a “Trusted Information Bank” about Champix (Chantix).  At the base of the page, a disclaimer states “We don’t encourage the buying and selling of Chantix without prescription”, which is a weird thing to claim when you can buy it right there, via the site!  It mentions nothing about any dangers, but says:

“Chantix is the latest blockbuster drug approved by the FDA on May 11, 2006 that is indicated as an aid to quit smoking. Manufactured by Pfizer Inc., Chantix offers a new approach, different from the existing smoking cessation therapies to quit smoking.”

It does not mention that the drug is now under investigation by the FDA for serious side effects.   Instead it uses crude scare-tactics in the first two, very badly written paragraphs about the dangers of smoking to suggest that Chantix is your ‘only hope’, if you are a smoker, to escape ‘certain death’. The site is called ChantixMagic and it is dangerously devoid of any serious warnings about how this medication could wreck your life or even end it.

In reality, Champix is a pretty faint hope because it doesn’t work for at least 80% of smokers even with all that hype.  In contrast, expert hypnotherapy has a 60% success rate in first sessions alone.  If you include the successes that took more than one session (some do, it’s inevitable, people are not all the same) then the overall success rate is well over 80% PROVIDED the therapist is a smoking cessation specialist with plenty of experience.

I should also qualify the above statement by saying that I’m talking about success rates in countries in which tobacco use is in general decline.  I work in the U.K. where only about 26% of adults still smoke, so smoking is not the norm.  In countries like Greece and China where there is a much greater proportion of smokers, the long-term success-rate of hypnotherapy would not be as high because the influence of other people smoking has a bearing on relapse rates for all quitting methods, including hypnotherapy – as does the general social perception of what is “the norm”.

So you see, ChampixMagic, I already have a link to your site but I don’t think it was quite what you had in mind.  Since all you want to do is sell more prescription medications without prescriptions or proper warnings regardless of whether it harms or kills people, I suggest you go throw yourself off a cliff.

safer alternative

 

Chantix Champix Kills: But Don’t Tell The Smokers!

The Canadian Lung Association fails to mention any serious side effects associated with Chantix Champix. This is a very serious omission, but it is no different from what most doctors are doing. The blog also informs us that The Canadian Lung Association received funding in the form of a grant from… Pfizer Canada, the Canadian arm of the global drug giant Pfizer, who make Chantix Champix.

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.*

 

The Real Threat to Doctors, Pharmacists and the Medical Profession

To learn the truth about Chantix Champix, all you have to do is Google “Champix suicides” (or Chantix suicides) and read all about it for yourself.

But why should smokers have to do that? Most smokers assume that their doctor or their pharmacist would warn them of any serious risks that their patient might be running if they take Chantix Champix. Some do: in fact, we have heard anecdotally of one or two doctors who have refused to prescribe it. However, these are the exceptions.

Reading around the blogs which are dealing with the Chantix Champix controversy it becomes frighteningly clear that most smokers are left completely in the dark by doctors and pharmacists about the serious side effects of Chantix Champix, and only warned about the minor ones. The fact that this negligence is leading to injuries and deaths must surely be actionable. We are talking about a medication that is currently under investigation by the FDA for serious and dangerous side-effects. It has been very clearly implicated in many suicide attempts and a considerable number of deaths. Many other people have had other horrible reactions that have left them hospitalised, terrified and emotionally damaged, and also Chantix Champix has wrecked relationships and families.

Your doctor and your pharmacist may decide, though, that they’d better not tell you that in case you decide not to take the damn stuff.

One recent contributor to this blog, Kath (see Champix 4: Enough Already. Comment No.98) – was particularly angry about that point, once I had explained that she was not alone. She said:

“Chris thank you for taking the time to respond to me. As I read your reply what really stuck out is that when I had a weird episode of behaviour at 4 weeks, I would have known where it was coming from if I knew that Champix has side effects. If my doctor had warned me to watch for behavioural changes I would have been off this drug much sooner, before it made me into a blubbering mess. That is what bothers me the most.

I was having a conversation with a friend today about how even the doctor makes money when he writes a script. That is really effed up. How can my doctor have a financial benefit to prescribing a drug? What the hell kind of world are we living in? How can we expect to get proper health care when the gp’s make money for giving us life-threatening drugs?”

How indeed. And this is the real threat to the future of the medical profession. It is obvious why Chantix Champix is getting the whitewash treatment, and it all comes down to money. Doctors are treated to free trips, lavish treatment at ‘conferences’ and all kinds of incentives to promote medications which can all be summed up in one simple word: Corrupt.

How complacent are you, all you medical professionals who are just sitting on your hands and pretending it is okay to keep taking the incentives and keep your mouths shut about killer drugs like Chantix Champix? You keep pretending nicotine replacement is a real medication even though you know it doesn’t work at all, you keep prescribing Prozac and Seroxat even though we all know now that they didn’t perform any better than placebos in the trials… Your professional credibility is rotting away even as I type this, and the stench of your corruption is making even the most conservative of patients wince. If you continue down this road there will BE no medical profession, it will all become Medico-Pharmaceutical Inc.

Think I’m exaggerating? Then have a look at this report by one of the few exceptions, a blog edited by practising Canadian pharmacists called Canada Pharmacy News. The story points out that The Canadian Lung Association fails to mention any serious side effects associated with Chantix Champix. This is a very serious omission, but it is no different from what most doctors are doing. The blog also informs us that The Canadian Lung Association received funding in the form of a grant from… Pfizer Canada, the Canadian arm of the global drug giant Pfizer, who make Chantix Champix. Only a few days ago, the Justice Department in the USA announced that Pfizer had been ordered to pay a record settlement of 2.3 billion dollars for “fraudulent marketing”. Nothing to do with Chantix Champix, that one, by the way. But this is (link).

The credibility of pharmacists and doctors was originally based on hard science, but it has all been hijacked by the medico-mafia of the drug companies and their well-placed friends in the medical authorities, the medication approval bodies, academia and the press. Once you’ve lost that credibility in the minds of the public, Doc, you will never get it back.

practice website

The book that blew the whistle on the nicotine scam

Chantix Champix 4 – Enough Already

Anyone considering using Chantix Champix should read this article FIRST, then investigate other methods, particularly hypnotherapy, which involve NO RISK and produce far more long-term success anyway than any pharmaceutical quit-product (see evidence on this site and in the book). If you want to know more about hypnotherapy, visit the Central Hypnotherapy website.

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.*

Having begun this with a fairly open mind when it came to Chantix Champix – a relatively new medication – in the 14 months since I first referred to it in my book, which was the end of May 2007 when its launch was announced in the U.K., I have decided upon a personal stance. I think it is highly unpredictable and sometimes very dangerous, and should never have been passed in the U.K. because many of these problems had already surfaced in the U.S., and caution – not hype – is the appropriate attitude for medical bodies to adopt when something new appears.

All you Chantix Champix apologists who are trying to claim that adverse reactions are “withdrawal of nicotine”, I refer you to the U.S. Surgeon General. The following link takes you to an article posted on the website of WhyQuit.com, which is not, as you might assume from the name, a pro-smoking group, but an advocate of quitting without pharmaceutical products. The article is called Champix and Chantix linked to Depression, Aggression and Suicide. Anyone considering using Chantix Champix should read this article FIRST, then investigate other methods, particularly hypnotherapy, which involve NO RISK and produce far more long-term success anyway than any pharmaceutical quit-product (see evidence on this site and in the book). If you want to know more about hypnotherapy, visit the Central Hypnotherapy website.

Here is the rather grim Champix article.

Posting Comments 2

Internet “pharmacies” are unregulated drug shops that make a mockery of the role of the medical doctor and the whole concept of prescription drugs. As an outlet it is a dream come true for the pharmaceutical industry and the biggest threat to the very existence of the medical profession it has ever faced in its history, and they don’t even know it.

by hypnotherapist Chris Holmes

Out of the 13 comments awaiting moderation today, only 1 turned out to be real. The other 12 were mainly long lists of porn video titles, the strange variety of which makes me feel really normal, as I scroll down to the Spam button which prevents these things from getting on the site. One has to be impressed to some degree, though, by the determination of porn producers to cater for every taste, as evidenced by one example today, entitled “Grandmother Incest Stories”. I mean, whoever made that film cannot have been expecting to sell a lot of copies. Most inexplicable title so far has to be “Cold Hands and Feet”. What the hell is that? A fetish? Or is it a euphemism for necrophilia? Either way, I don’t think I really need to know.

The other unwanted contributions were from internet sites pushing pharmaceuticals. One was peddling Zoloft, a selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor (SSRI) originally approved by the FDA in 1991 as an anti-depressant along with Prozac, and other drugs in the same class. As it is now public knowledge that SSRI drug trials actually showed virtually no useful success and did indicate some dangers, but the drug companies were selective about what they told the FDA so they got approved anyway, why anyone should choose to buy it now might seem to be a mystery. Especially after they read the warning attached by the people selling the stuff:

“Care should be exercised if this drug is prescribed as prolonged use to treat depression through antidepressants carry the risk of suicidal behaviour especially in the younger generations”.

So, who wants to buy some of this chemical compound that sometimes makes sad young people feel like killing themselves? Form an orderly queue now, no pushing and shoving, I’m sure Pfizer made enough for everyone. If you’re over sixty five though, the suicide risk is described as “significantly lower”, probably because once you are approaching ‘three score years and ten’ as the Biblical term has it, there hardly seems any point in hastening your demise anyway. The patient might as well just be… well, patient.

Perhaps still more mysterious is the fact that Zoloft received approval in 2003 “for use in paediatric patients although it carries a warning about suicidal tendencies in younger patients.” What kind of stupid approval system did that then?

Most astonishing of all is the phrase: “Care should be exercised if this drug is prescribed…” Clearly this phrase has been lifted from another place – another time, in fact. A time when drugs like this had to be prescribed. Care should be exercised? By whom? You are selling it over the internet, you stupid, stupid bastards! And somebody, somewhere is going to end up killing themselves as a result, it’s inevitable! Is no-one going to stop this madness? Is no-one even going to try?

These ‘Internet Pharmacies’ are just unsupervised outlets for old, and sometimes discredited medications to be dumped on the public when their exclusive patents run out, which in the case of Zoloft was 2006. Just an unscrupulous way of squeezing a little bit more money out of them before they are abandoned utterly, to help pay for the next generation of unnatural and risky chemical concoctions. And if you are inclined to think I’m being too critical – an extremist, perhaps – and that these people are not just greedy, irresponsible drug-pushers posing as responsible professionals, just consider this: there’s a special offer attached to Zoloft on this site, which you would never have been offered by any doctor. If you buy 60 Zoloft pills, you get 2 free Viagra tablets! If you buy 90 or more, you get four. This is, quite obviously, an attempt to sell thirty more tablets by giving away a few tablets of a completely different medication!

Was Zoloft ever tested in clinical trials in combination with Viagra, to see if there’s any reaction or risk associated with taking them together? No, of course not! And should it not be illegal – because it is certainly unethical – to try to shift old stocks of one medication by offering other tablets – for a completely different condition – for free?

Surely you don’t have to be a radical thinker to recognise that what is happening here is insane. And don’t say: “There’s nothing anyone can do, it’s international, it’s the internet, there are no controls…” I notice they aren’t selling heroin or LSD, so someone is controlling it, aren’t they? Heroin happens to be a very effective painkiller, so it’s not because it doesn’t have a medical use. And no-one takes the attitude “There’s nothing anyone can do” when it comes to child pornography, do they? International laws may vary, but they still manage to bust people, don’t they? These drug peddlers should be hunted down and busted, because they are selling drugs without any restrictions that were only approved for supply on prescription. Can you imagine how alarmed you would be, if a shop opened up in your town centre called No Questions Asked, with hundreds of medications just sitting on shelves, self-service checkouts and people just milling about putting one medicine after another into their shopping basket? That shop is closer than you think. And it delivers packages that are discreetly wrapped.

Nobody should be able to buy prescription drugs over the internet. Nobody should be selling drugs that way, profiteering from the vulnerability of people whose doctor might not have prescribed those drugs for a very good reason. It is blatant drug-pushing, and anyone involved in selling prescription drugs without prescription is directly responsible for any harm that comes to people as a result. So are the manufacturers. If new laws are needed they are well overdue – too many people die from drugs that were prescribed by a doctor – remove that restriction and the fatalities and dependencies are bound to rocket.

The Truth Will Out Campaign is essentially about blowing the whistle on the Nicotine Replacement Poisoning Scam, but that raised questions about the system that approves such things as if they were a useful medication, which naturally leads to us noticing when other examples crop up, because it is yet more evidence proving the pressing need for change. And we never have to wait long: only the other day I was listening to a report on BBC Radio 4 about an ‘atypical anti-psychotic’ drug which is reckoned to have killed seven hundred people in the UK in the last five years (conservative estimate). And that’s just the fatalities, it does not include all the non-fatal strokes and pneumonia cases the drug causes, which led to a warning about that being attached by the National Institute for Chemical Excess (N.I.C.E.), as well as a specific guideline that this drug should not be prescribed to patients who just have dementia, because it is inappropriate, they are not psychotic. That was in 2004, but unfortunately some doctors thought it was worth the risk to go on doing that anyway, because it keeps dementia patients pretty quiet by knocking them senseless. The estimate of the experts is that of the 150,000 people in the UK currently being prescribed that drug, about 100,000 would not be if the guidelines were being followed.

I had barely finished shaking my head in disbelief over that one, and already there’s another story about N.I.C.E. all over the front page of today’s Daily Mail: SUICIDE FEAR ‘FAT PILL’ GETS GO AHEAD is the headline, and the story is that Acomplia, also known as rimonabant, has just been approved by N.I.C.E. for use by the NHS in the UK, despite being banned in the United States because of a risk of suicidal thoughts, low mood and depression, anxiety, irritability, nervousness and sleep disorders which apparently occur in 10% of cases. This risk is reckoned to be acceptable by N.I.C.E. because, according to the Daily Mail: “Trials have shown that it could help two out of five patients lose 10% of their weight”.

That’s a pretty poor show. And anyway, for how long? I work with weight issues all the time, and I know that diets and drugs only cause temporary weight loss, which usually goes straight back on again because no-one is addressing the real causes of the behaviour that put the weight there in the first place. By the end of the drug trial, they managed to demonstrate up to 10% reduction, although three out of five patients did not even achieve that. That’s all they have to do to get the damn stuff approved! No-one is looking at the long-term outcome, so this is not really evidence of efficacy. All it really indicates is that a minority of those taking it lose a bit of weight whilst they are taking the drug, but tells you nothing about what happens when they stop taking it.

This is how the drug companies are getting a lot of drugs passed now, as if they are genuinely effective when actually they only looked at the short-term effect. Same thing happened with Nicotine Replacement products, didn’t it? Once it gets rubber-stamped by approval bodies like N.I.C.E., it looks for all the world as if it was an “evidence-based medicine”, when it is really nothing of the kind. After that, it will not lose its ‘acceptable’ status even if it kills hundreds of people!

And that’s how the cynical bastards can still manage to sell Zoloft to some poor, unsuspecting fool who doesn’t realise just how much of a sleazy scam all this really is. That, and the free Viagra. All of which is almost enough to give anyone the odd suicidal thought occasionally, even if they do have more sense than to take any of these unnatural and dangerous concoctions themselves.

Hypnotherapy is brilliant for weight loss. No risk. And with results that last, too. Read more about it here. Now can I have some opinions about internet drug shops, free Viagra and whether those pharmacies should be allowed to sell LSD and heroin too, perhaps?  Don’t be shy, say what you like!  Perhaps you own an internet pharmacy, or maybe you’re a small-time street drug dealer who is worried about the competition…  We’re getting good contributions to the Champix (Chantix) debate, but so far no-one has said anything at all about Webdealing.

N.B. In order to post a comment, you need to use the “Leave a Reply” facility which should appear at the end of each of my posts here on the blog.  If it does not appear, click on the “No Comments” below the post.  Obviously some posts do have comments already, so if it says “35 Comments”, click on that and the Reply facility should appear.  If any of this does not appear top be working, please let me know through the “Contact Us” page.

Nicotine: The Drug That Never Was

Central Hypnotherapy

** Update 22.07.09

Any further comments should be uploaded to the site within 48 hours.  If you are seeking information about Champix/Chantix please read all the comments attached to the numerous posts in the Champix section.

This site is really about the Nicotine Replacement Poisoning scam, and we believe that the post entitled ‘The Great NHS Lie Exposed’ says all there is to say about that.  We have proved our claims entirely true with scientific reports eventually prised out of the clutches of the Department of Stealth.  NRT simply doesn’t work at all and not a penny more of public cash should be squandered on it. Q.E.D.

***2nd update 16/07/10: This week on UK television there was a documentary investigating mail order drugs, and that included the shocking news that even heart medications were being sold with free Viagra tablets, which is particularly dangerous as a combination or it would be if any of these tablets actually contained what they were supposed to contain. Some do, some don’t – but even some of the ones that do were found to vary alarmingly in strength according to this documentary.
What I found particularly ironic in this programme was that one of the experts they turned to for a scientific commentary on the dangerous aspects of these criminal practices was the head of Pfizer’s fake medicines department, if I heard it correctly. Pfizer make Champix, which they know damn well is currently killing people and destroying lives and relationships and damaging people’s health all over the world but they’re making so much money out of it that they won’t withdraw it, and they’re commenting on the reckless profiteering of the pharma-pirates? What’s the difference, really? It was like watching that old TV clip of Harold Shipman being interviewed by an unsuspecting reporter years before he was discovered to be a mass murderer. Of course I’m not comparing the woman concerned to Shipman, I’m sure she’s very professional in that post – but Pfizer as a company. They are killing people with that medication right now, and they fully intend to go on doing that until somebody else forces them to stop.

 

 

Champix/Chantix

The scariest Champix reports were those that involved unexpected changes to mental well-being, including one woman who told me that she stopped taking it because she was having time-lapses in her day she could not account for, including whilst driving. A five-minute journey seemed to have taken twenty-five minutes, for no reason she could remember or explain, and she was deeply concerned.

 

*Update 1: 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.*

**Update 2, 4th November 2011:

The American Food & Drug Administration (FDA) were reported recently in the Business section of the Washington Post as reassuring smokers that Chantix (known as Champix everywhere outside the USA) “does not increase psychiatric problems”, according to two small studies involving 26,000 smokers.  Since this flies in the face of everything else they know about Chantix already, it is surely irresponsible to say such a thing at this time, because the caveats added to the story further down do not carry anything like the weight of the inevitable headline.  Meanwhile, this article in the Daily Mail reports a study which states exactly the opposite.

Why?  Because the Daily Mail is not bending over backward to assist the pharmaceutical industry – even at the expense of smokers’ lives, if that’s what it takes – whereas the FDA very clearly is.  The testing and approvals system is corrupt as hell, using every possible means of dragging their feet so that Chantix/Champix stays of the market and remains ‘approved’ regardless of how many individual smokers’ lives are ruined by the drug.

The Truth Will Out Campaign has been trying to alert smokers (and doctors) to the dangers of this drug since Autumn of 2008, but just imagine the frustration of this commentator on the new Daily Mail report:

“Oh now they make this a huge statement. My mom used it in mid 2007. She ended up in a mental hospital. Thanks Champix. This stuff shouldn’t even be on the market!!! I still can’t understand why it is, with all these accounts of suicide! I read horror story’s back then after this happened to my mom about people killing themselves or having illness such as bi-polar disorder activated in them. My rule with all drugs is, if it hasn’t been on the market for more then 10 years…DO NOT take it. You never want to be the guinea pig. Sorry for all those who ended their lives because they were manipulated this drug.

– Danielle, USA,
3/11/2011 6:08″**

 

Champix/Chantix

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.*

 

At the very end of the book Nicotine: The Drug That Never Was, in the final section called A Pause For Breath which you can read here on the site, I mentioned the announcement of the coming of a new magic pill to stop people smoking, which coincided with my completion of the book in May 2007. What I didn’t know at the time I was writing that last section was that the number of smoking clients I was used to getting every week was about to drop by around 50% as thousands of would-be quitters raced off to try the new medication instead.

People want magic pills. They want to believe the doctor can make their problems go away, just by swallowing a little tablet and then getting on with their day. So as soon as the headlines hit – “New Pill to Stop Smoking! Available on the NHS within weeks!” – hypnotherapists like myself who specialise in smoking cessation encountered an unexpected drought that went on from June 2007 right through to the end of the year. Now we’re pretty much back to normal, as everyone has learned that the latest magic pill isn’t magic after all – surprise, surprise – in fact it has turned out to be a horrible nightmare for some.

Champix is supposed to work by ‘blocking the nicotine receptors so that smokers no longer enjoy smoking’, which is actually nonsense because habitual smokers don’t smoke for enjoyment anyway. Some may believe they do, but if you ask any smoker to focus on the pleasure of smoking, and then describe it to you, they will find themselves unable to do that.  Then ask them what their first cigarette was like – most smokers remember that it was disgusting.  So, if there is a pleasure in smoking, how come none of us noticed it straight away?

The truth is that the pleasure is all in the moment, none of it is coming from the cigarette.  Only smoke is coming from the cigarette, which we all found nauseating to begin with, but it’s amazing what you can become accustomed to.  Simply because habitual smokers tend to smoke at moments of repose – which are usually pleasant moments because they are no longer stressed or exerting themselves – many smokers adopt the idea that they enjoy smoking.  Even so, there will be moments when that illusion falters, and the original nausea and disgust becomes noticeable again. Nicotine itself is not pleasant in any way, as all smokers noticed on the first day they ever inhaled the smoke – and apparently, neither is Champix.

Only a few weeks after Champix became available on prescription in the U.K. I began hearing reports from the only people I really trust these days when it comes to quit products: smokers themselves.  The most common remark about the drug was that it caused quite severe nausea, but there have also been much more severe reactions too.  If you have taken Champix yourself, or someone close to you has, feel free to add comments at the end of this post.

Some reports I have heard suggest that although the urge to smoke seems to disappear whilst taking Champix, it returns once the drug is out of your system.

The course of nausea-inducing tablets is twelve weeks, which is a long time to put up with nausea. Not everyone is nauseous for that long apparently, some only reported that for a short period after taking the tablet, but others seem to be regularly heaving or actually vomiting. Since when is medicine supposed to make you ill? Does it really just ‘work’ by making you feel too rough to face smoking, rather like a hangover does? That’s a bit unsophisticated, isn’t it? Sounds a bit dangerous, too. Hypnotherapy – by contrast – isn’t nauseating or dangerous, and the whole process usually only takes a couple of hours. For the majority, that’s it: you’re a non-smoker again. No cravings, no willpower needed, no bad moods and no weight gain. That’s one hell of a lot better than taking tablets that make you ill for weeks on end, isn’t it? Not to mention safer, and with a much higher success-rate, when it’s done properly.

Champix Scary Side-Effects

The scariest Champix reports were those that involved unexpected changes to mental well-being, including one woman who told me that she stopped taking it because she was having time-lapses in her day she could not account for, including whilst driving. A five-minute journey seemed to have taken twenty-five minutes, for no reason she could remember or explain, and she was deeply concerned. A report published in The Telegraph (24.10.07) warned that people taking Champix had been told by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) not to drive when taking the medication, following two accidents blamed on the drug. Dizziness and sleepiness are two side-effects of Champix, made by Pfizer.

Okay, so how is that going to work in reality? Smokers are put on this for twelve weeks, or even twenty-four weeks if they are still smoking after the first twelve. Does the GP say: “By the way, don’t drive for the next six months”? No, they are much more likely to just say: “Don’t drive if you don’t feel well”, but the trouble is, most people on Champix feel unwell daily. Still got to get to work, haven’t they? So the MHRA have issued a warning that few working smokers can possibly heed in practice. How many people are driving about under the effects of a drug that is known to cause dizziness and/or sleepiness – and even memory loss – for anything up to six months?  Given to them by their doctor.

Recent Updated Warnings by Pfizer

At the beginning of 2008 Pfizer added more warnings to the medication suggesting that users should be monitored for erratic behaviour, suicidal thoughts or personality changes whilst on the drug. Okay – by whom? Since the only people likely to see that warning at all are the user and their GP, how is that supposed to work in practice? The people most likely to notice those changes are family and work colleagues – all of whom will probably be unaware of Pfizer’s warning and some of whom may be subordinate to the user in some crucial way which makes swift and effective response unlikely or impossible if indeed any sudden erratic behaviour occurs.

What if the user is a police officer, or in the armed forces? What if they are an air-traffic controller, a crane driver, a rail signalman or a pilot? **Update: Pilots and air-traffic controllers have now been banned from taking Champix** Memory lapses, sudden personality changes or suicidal thoughts take on a whole new angle in such cases, and even the driving issue makes Champix a potential threat to anyone even trying to cross a road. The mass-prescribing of Champix to smokers is actually a gigantic experiment, and what that updated warning from Pfizer really means is this:

“We’ve covered our asses now, you’ll just have to chance it in practice unless you can afford to quit work for a few months… and if anything terrible happens to you or your loved one, and you try to blame the medication, our well-paid legal team will create just enough uncertainty to make sure you get the blame for the disaster, sucker!”

If you have a story to tell about Champix, let us know. If you would like to know more about how hypnotherapy can help with smoking, or any other issue, visit the Central Hypnotherapy Website.

If you wish to comment on this, or any other post on this blog please use the Leave a Reply facility at the end of the list of comments below.