Success with nicotine products

I hate to break this to you, smokers, but your government doesn’t want you to realise that NRT doesn’t work because they don’t really want you to stop smoking.

by Chris Holmes

A full eighteen months after Harvard University proved that nicotine replacement therapy “is no more effective in helping people stop smoking cigarettes in the long term than trying to quit on one’s own”, we might wonder why smokers are still being prescribed these useless products at the taxpayers’ expense. This is no longer an “evidence-based” medicine – in fact it is not a medicine at all and never has been. There is no such thing as “therapeutic nicotine”.

“Therapeutic” means it does you GOOD!

Nicotine is a poison. All the effects of nicotine are toxic, but the drug companies that produce nicotine replacement products have been funding research for years now, trying to find another application for the products because they know it won’t be long before all smokers know it doesn’t work at all. Every now and then stories pop up in the press reporting that “research suggests” that nicotine patches “might be useful” for this, or “could be helpful” for that.

The problem with “research”

Let us not forget that it was “research” which suggested in the first place that nicotine replacement poisoning “might be” helpful to smokers. The trouble is, they only looked at the short-term effects. This is what passes for “science” nowadays because research like this is organised and funded by the companies that make the products, and all they’re after is a licence. So those short-term effects don’t have to be impressive, they only have to be slightly better than a control group using a placebo. This is easy to organise: you just run several groups at the same time, some with placebos and some with the product, using only small numbers of people within each group.

Cherry picking

Why small numbers? Because when you convert that number into a percentage later, you magnify it. Then you cherry pick both ways: you take the placebo group with the lowest number of successes, and the product group with the highest. The difference in real numbers of successes may be no more than a random anomaly really, but as soon as you convert both figures into percentages it looks like a very clear and positive result. Sometimes they even stop clinical trials early because they have achieved that already and they don’t want to blunder on long enough to run into nasty side effects or relapses that may occur in the long term. It is okay for the end-user to blunder into that sort of thing, but we don’t want it mussing up the trial data.

Exclusions

Did I mention that we exclude anyone from the trials who might be fragile in any way mentally or physically? Just in case they don’t respond very well or have a bad reaction that might mess up the trial and make the drug look dangerous. Of course the end-user isn’t protected by being excluded. Doctors will prescribe it with confidence to anyone, because they fondly imagine that it has been proven in the trials to be effective and safe. It hasn’t.

The truth about NRT

The cruel truth is that nicotine replacement products are still being fraudulently funded by public money and recommended to smokers because it creates the impression that the government is doing something about smoking but in reality it does not reduce the tobacco tax revenue by being effective in stopping people smoking. In fact that official endorsement legitimises a bogus product which can also be bought over the counter, and the government collect Value Added Tax (meaningless phrase that, isn’t it?) from the sale of those products. Also, promoting methods that actually work – such as hypnotherapy, for example – would save lives, meaning that more people would live to retirement age and start claiming a pension when there are frankly too many people doing that already…

The truth about the Department of Health

So that is why, when the science proved that every penny of public money spent on nicotine products is completely wasted, the government pretended not to notice, just as they did when their own research came to the same conclusions in 2005 (the Borland Report). I hate to break this to you, smokers, but your government doesn’t want you to realise that NRT doesn’t work because they don’t really want you to stop smoking. They want you to smoke, then try the nicotine gum, then smoke, then try the patches, then smoke, then try the lozenges, then smoke, then try the microtab, then smoke, then try the nicotine spray, then relapse into smoking again and hopefully this will have taken so many years that you ALMOST get to retirement age but not quite.

And then they want you to die. That is what “success with nicotine products” means to them.

NRT: Biggest Quack Therapy in History

Truth Will Out calls upon the NHS to drop Nicotine Replacement products in the light of the latest proof that they are worthless, and also calls upon The Nightingale Collaboration to support that call or lose all its credibilty with regard to its stated aims “to improve the protection of the public by getting misleading claims withdrawn and those responsible held to account.”

by hypnotherapist Chris Holmes

Now that the latest research from Harvard University  has found that:

“…using NRT (Nicotine Replacement Therapy) is no more effective in helping people stop smoking cigarettes in the long term than trying to quit on one’s own.”

– exactly as The Truth Will Out Campaign has been stating since May 2008 based on the UK government’s own research

… it is time for all interested parties in this debate to demand that the NHS drop this worthless poison nicotine, which has never been “therapeutic” and stop lying to smokers about its supposed efficacy.  This global fraud is still being marketed, promoted and sold all over the world with the blessing AND recommendation of Medical Authorities and parties CLAIMING to be ‘scientific’ in principle and in practice, and these products have been wrongly labelled: “Evidence-based medicine”, when in fact they are neither medicine NOR evidence-based unless we are to allow the most blatantly misleading, shameless marketing spin to be regarded as evidence.

I think it was Edzard Ernst who said that there is no such thing as alternative medicine, there is only medicine:  it either works or it doesn’t.  His friends in The Nightingale Collaboration seem to agree: on their website they tell us that:

“We have set up The Nightingale Collaboration to enable us to share our knowledge and experience in challenging misleading claims in healthcare advertising and encourage anyone who is concerned in protecting the public from misinformation in healthcare promotion to join us in challenging it.  Together we can work to improve the protection of the public by getting misleading claims withdrawn and those responsible held to account.”

Right – so that’s ANY kind of healthcare, right?  So that would include all the misleading claims about nicotine replacement poisoning of the sort I’ve been exposing for years, surely?  Now that we have numerous independent scientific reports that consistently show long-term effects mirroring the long-term outcome for willpower alone at around 6%, there is clearly NO SCIENTIFIC BASIS for the endorsement or promotion of these products and especially not at taxpayers’ expense, and the NHS – a public service – has no business pretending that has not been clearly established.

So all those supposedly ‘scientific’ individuals who style themselves “quackbusters” have a bit of a dilemma here, don’t they?  They have designed their website carefully to make it look as though they are being all-inclusive in their bid to protect the public from lies and misinformation in the field of healthcare, but Martin Robbins’ “Lay scientist” piece in The Guardian annnouncing the launch of The Nightingale Collaboration completely gave away their real agenda: “A new skeptical campaign [which] aims to put the screws on alternative medicine.”

Question: Why be so coy about that on the Nightingale Collaboration website, then?  Answer: To appear objective, mislead the public and pay lip-service to the notion that the same ‘rigorous’ standards of scientific enquiry into safety and efficacy should be applied to both conventional medicine (ConMed) AND alternative methods, when in fact thay are not investigating ConMed at all.

But to have any real credibility over your stated aim to be trying to protect the public regarding misleading claims in healthcare, Collaborators, you surely cannot ignore the biggest medical scam ever perpetrated on an unsuspecting public.  NRT was originally approved on the basis of its performance at only 6 weeks.  The manufacturers were even allowed to quote that short-term result on the packaging as if it were the actual success rate of the product, which I KNOW you would be up in arms about if it were a herbal remedy, or something like that.  So come on:  we’re challenging you, here, to demonstrate that what you loftily declare on your website isn’t just meaningless cant.

The UK government have known since The Borland Report was published in 2005 that the long-term outcome of NRT is the same as willpower, and yet they have carried on regardless with the purchase and endorsement of these products – fraudulently, with taxpayers’ resources – for a further seven years, deliberately wasting smokers’ time with products that they KNOW will not actually help them – and in that time something like a further 770,000 smokers in the UK have died.  For you to wink at that, Collaborators, whilst getting all outraged about what some homeopath says on their website would prove you to be utterly insincere and fantastically petty, would it not?

This latest damning research from Harvard clearly proves Nicotine Replacement to be the biggest Quack Therapy in history and now this hideously corrupt boil on the face of healthcare must be lanced, so I’m sure, Collaborators, that you will feel that you must – for the sake of your credibility alone, if not your honour – join me in demanding that the NHS now DROP NICOTINE REPLACEMENT  PRODUCTS AND ADMIT THEIR FAILURE AND USELESSNESS so that “we can work to improve the protection of the public by getting misleading claims withdrawn and those responsible held to account.”

No need to thank me for drawing this massive fraud and human disaster to your attention – after all, we’re working together here to protect the innocent – right Collaborators?

The easiest way to quit smoking

The Nicotine Myth Exploded

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.