Category Archives for "How to Quit Smoking"

How to Quit Smoking

The very idea that you need a way, method, technique, or tool to quit smoking is odd. If you want to quit smoking, or quit doing anything, surely, you just quit!

Of course it’s not so simple in the case of smoking, and I’m only too well aware that many smokers have genuine difficulty in quitting.

A whole industry has grown up of quit-smoking aids, from nicotine patches and gum, e-cigarettes, and prescription drugs, to say nothing of gimmicks like hypnosis, laser treatment, magnets in your ears, coconut oil, and so on.

All these approaches offer techniques of one sort of another; none offers understanding.

The Symonds Method (the word ‘method’ is used merely for convenience) on the other hand is based on helping smokers to understand and to demonstrate to themselves why they really smoke and why quitting seems so hard; then it will be easy.

Millions and Millions of Vapers

In support of the suggestion that e-cigarettes (‘vaping’) should be available on the NHS, there is a clip shown on the BBC Radio 5 Alive program (19 August 2015) featuring Professor Kevin Fenton from Public Health England. He points out that “more than 2.5 million smokers have already purchased their own e-cigarettes…some are using them […]

Continue reading

World Expert on Smoking and Addiction

With such a billing, who might this be? It’s Professor Robert West, a psychologist and self-styled world expert on smoking and addiction who thinks unless e-cigarettes are made available we’re condemning smokers to death (BBC interview, April 2014). He published a book in 2013 with the intriguing title The SmokeFree Formula, A Revolutionary Way to […]

Continue reading

Smoking Cessation on the NHS

There’s a stop smoking promotion by NHS England called ‘Stoptober’, presumably because this scheme was launched in the month of October. Stoptober is the conventional approach – discouraging. They seem to recognize this fact and try to make a joke of it: Welcome to Day 1 of Stoptober. Now, it’s fair to say that this […]

Continue reading