Tips To Quit Smoking Forever

quit smoking products such as NRT patches and gums could really be make the problem worse by perpetuating the addiction at a low dosage that does not relieve the withdrawal craving. Add to this the fact that the smoker continues to incur significant cost, with nothing to show for it in terms of withdrawal from nicotine dependency.

Not so obvious, the heavy marketing of such stop smoking products has a similar, unconscious, conditioning effect to the promotion of cigarettes themselves - and you don’t want to be addicted to nicotine patches forever. At best this leaves the smoker bewildered.

Anti-depressant drugs

Anti-depressant drugs may help easy symptoms of withdrawal. Brupopion (Zyban being it’s more well known name) is the most popular, and success rates of up to 30 per cent are claimed both as a stand-alone product and also in association with nicotine replcement therapy coupled with guidance or counseling.

In some cases there have been disturbing side effects and it is a relatively costly drug, usually prescribed for a period of some months. The same unaccounted variables as with NRT may apply.

Smokers often have other desires to stop when they undergo an expensive smoking cessation process such as this, and the effect of this cannot be tracked in the published results. As motivation is cited universally as the biggest factor in quitting smoking, the results of drug-based stop smoking therapies are not reliable. In particular they do not address the habitual behavior and psychological factors involved.

Not many studies measure effectiveness longer than 18 months in any case, so this is not a measure of permanent withdrawal, with which we are concerned in this article.

Many researchers make similar claims. For example, Schneider et al. proved that simply issuing NRT products actually resulted in a lower quit rate with active gum than with placebo treatment (8% nicotine gum, 13% placebo gum).

To be fair, the product inserts for all transdermal nicotine remedies indicate that it should be used as part of a stop smoking program. Of course most patients simply buy and apply the nicotine patches like sticking plaster. Without any behavioral help, we can therefore expect very low quit rates with nicotine patches.

Drugs are habit forming just like cigarettes, of course, and recurring attempts of smoking cessation mean repeat sales and more profit. The fact that these profits fund major research programs helps to explain why the truth about the relative effectiveness of quit smoking products does not reach the average smoker.