Tag: therapeutic

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.

‘New Poison for Old!’ Part 2

by hypnotherapist Chris Holmes

(Sing!): “What Shall We Do With The Poison Factory…?”

In the original post entitled “New Poison For Old!” I pointed to the amusing phenomenon over recent years of the drug companies who have already spent a lot of money developing the facilities for producing nicotine gum, patches, lozenges, micro-tabs, nasal sprays and suppositories spending research and development cash on probably futile attempts to find a real medical application for this extraordinarily poisonous substance. Good luck with that one guys!

So numerous times over recent years stories have popped up in the medical literature and the press about ‘possible’ new applications for nicotine. The desperate hope of the manufacturers is that the world will accept the daft suggestion (if it is repeated often enough) that nicotine is potentially a useful substance from a medicinal point of view, and ‘looks promising’ in test trials that have nothing to do with the original idea that it might help smokers in some way, which it doesn’t.  Most smokers and nearly all medical experts know that now, and even those few that don’t soon will… so the race is on to find an issue or a condition that might be marginally affected by nicotine in short-term drug trials (if they conduct enough of them!) which is all it takes to get the damn stuff passed as if it were a medication for another spurious use… i.e. exactly what happened with the smoking application in the first place anyway.

All this is driven, not by any attempt at medical advancement, but by the economic reality of having the means of production already up and running but for an application that everyone is fast realising is bogus.  Is, was and always will be – so if they don’t find another use for it quick, the drug companies are going to be left with poison factories that they might as well just dismantle, along with the whole bonkers notion of “therapeutic nicotine” – a phrase that makes about as much sense as “therapeutic cyanide”.

This exercise is like someone trying to develop a new application for the swastika.  It was dangerous and useless enough last time it was popularised, now that it is recognised for what it really is, the last thing the world needs is someone giving it a makeover.

Anyway, to accompany these farcical attempts to find a useful application for what is simply a very deadly poison, I penned this little ditty which is loosely based on “What Shall we Do With The Drunken Sailor?”

What shall we do with the poison patches, What shall we do with the poison patches, What shall we do with the poison patches,  Now that we’ve been rumbled?

Quick, in-vent new uses, Quick, in-vent new uses, Quick, in-vent new uses – Must be good for something!

We need a use for the Poison Factory, We need a use for the Poison Factory, We need a use for the Poison Factory… Cost a bloody fortune!

Might it help asthmatics?  Might it help asthmatics? Might it help asthmatics?  – No?  Then try depression!

Feel down?  Try our patches!  Feel down? Try our patches! Feel down? Try our patches!  Just as ‘good’ as Prozac.

Nicotine may help your memory, Nicotine may help your memory, Nicotine may help your memory… Forget it’s a poison!

(Faster) Now try schizophrenics… Next those with Alzheimers… Wind? Cramp? Shyness? Baldness?  – Useless bloody poison!

What shall we do with the Poison Factory? What shall we do with the Poison Factory? What shall we do with the Poison Factory, Now that we’ve been rumbled?

Nicotine: The Drug That Never Was

Central Hypnotherapy

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