Nicotine Replacement Therapy

The nicotine replacement industry is probably the most heavily advertised method of stopping smoking. This is big business, very big business indeed. There are hundreds of companies all competing with each other to help you to quit. The problem is that they really do not care if you quit or not. Nope, they just care that you buy their product. To these people it is just a way of making money. People who want to stop smoking are easy prey. Desperation is a way of making money out of smokers who will try almost anything to stop. The key ingredient in all of this is the advertising. Those who invest the most in advertising get their product in front of the most potential customers, the current smokers who are literally dying to give up.

I did a little bit of research around the nicotine replacement industry and found some very suprising things. The current overall success rate for nicotine replacement is just 7% after one year. What Philip Morris's website will not tell you is that people who use over the counter nicotine patches have a 93% relpase rate after only 6 months. Even more disturbing is that people who have previously failed using nicotine patches have a 100% failure rate the second time. This means that if you try once with the patches you are guaranteed to fail the second time. These facts are based on studies that have been conducted on these nicotine patches.

I know where they are coming from because i tried several times using patches and the nicotine inhaler and failed. I even smoked with the patches on. Another side effect of the patches is the irritating red rash that appears wherever you stick them on your body. I use to change from one arm to the other, and i was left with little red patches all over my arms. I then tried sticking them on my legs, but they kept falling off. You can imagine the horror of finding that precious patch on the bloody floor and not being able to stick it back on because it has lost all it's stickiness.

The nicotine inhaler i tried was made to imitate a cigarette, you just add these little nicotine cartridges to them and suck away until there is nothing left. I went through loads of these things in just a couple of weeks. None of these things worked for me. I was still thinking about smoking all the time, and it was driving me crazy. You know the feeling, it is constantly on your mind. It is worse if you are at work and you go on your break and you realise that you don't smoke anymore because you are trying to give up. You get a real sense of depression because you used to look forward to that break because that is when you could light up and have a few cigs. You can imagine the feeling when you have to sit there andwatch others smoke, i used to get a feeling of missing out badly and it made me feel even worse than before. How can ever enjoy another break when you feel like this? I ended up cutting my break short to just get away and hopefully take my mind off it.

I felt like this even with the patches on, so why was this happening? Looking back now, and knowing what i now know about the whole smoking game, it is very simple. The problem is that the nicotine patches and the other products make it harder to quit. The reason is that they are still putting nicotine into your system, and most importantly into your brain. Smoking is just drug addiction and your brain wants more and more of it. When it gets the nicotine hit it is happy, so you feel satisfied, but only until the effects wear off and then your brain tells you it wants another hit thankyou very much. With nicotine it takes around 20 mins for this to happen. So you will want another cigarette every 20 mins, every day of your life. Of course you don't always light up every 20 mins, mainly due to work commitments and the actual cost of smoking. But by adding nicotine to your brain by using patches you are telling your brain that nicotine is still here baby so don't worry about that. This ensures that you will still be thinking about smoking all the time, and whilst this is going on you will certainly find it more difficult to stop smoking.