If you look around at advertisements that are hawking products to help you quit smoking, you will notice that there is a stop smoking shot that is a one time treatment that is supposed to help you quit. Will this help you to quit? Should you pursue the idea?
I looked into it a bit and my research says “no.” You should not get a shot to stop smoking. It will not help and it is something of a scam.
Basically what is happening in the quit smoking industry is that people are trying to make money by “helping” you to quit smoking. The beautiful thing from their point of view is that:
1) Quitting smoking is really, really hard.
2) Any quack remedy or therapy can be combined with basic quitting guidelines and counseling, so as to skew results.
3) It is a desperate market that is willing to spend big money (they already spend a ton on cigarettes, and can thus justify a big purchase to quit).
This is a marketers dream come true. Basically what they are doing is coming up with a ridiculous treatment for quitting that has no real bearing on the smoker, and then combining it with light therapy and general guidelines for quitting.
So let’s say you come up with a crazy form of massage that you claim will help people to quit smoking. Only you can do the special massage. You get 100 participants who already want to quit smoking to try your therapy. Maybe a few of them actually stay smoke free (based more on the fact that they wanted to quit in the first place). Then you can make the claim that your quit smoking massage therapy works! Now you can sell it, even though it is a sham.
They have already done this with laser treatments for smoking, as well as with magnet therapy. Now they are doing it with a shot.
“But”, you protest. “It is real medicine in the shot.” And of course, they are combining 2 prescription drugs in the shot. But one is an antihistamine that is just going to calm you down for a few hours, and the other drug does not do anything special either. If you wanted this effect you could go buy some over the counter Benadryl and get the same thing. The “shot” is just a useless prop, something to sell to people who are desperate for a cure and think that this is the new hot thing that really works.
It doesn’t.
