Should you try acupuncture to stop smoking?  Absolutely.  It is a decent secondary strategy that can help assist you in quitting smoking.  If you do go have the procedure done, you will notice that your craving to smoke will have decreased after the procedure.  As such, you might have a couple of sessions before you are really ready to stop smoking.

There is no reason to be nervous about the needles.  It does not really hurt much, if at all, and pretty much nobody complains about pain from the needles.  It is a very clean and clinical thing, not messy or scary at all.

Now if you plan to quit smoking with acupuncture, you should actually go far beyond just having this as your basic plan and come  up with some other strategies to help you to quit smoking.  Acupuncture can certainly help but it will probably not do the entire trick on its own.  In order to be successful at quitting, this will just need to be one part of your overall strategy.  Does that mean that you should not even use this method?  No, it is still worth being part of an overall quitting plan.  But you need more in order to insure that you are successful at staying stopped.

What are some strategies that can go along with acupuncture?  The main one is exercise.  You should be exercising every single day, and if you are not, then you should start.  It should be the type of exercise where it is somewhat vigorous and you are working up a sweat.  This can be a brisk walk if you like, or just about anything else, as long as you get your heart pumping and get your endorphins going.  You should aim for 30 minutes per day of vigorous exercise.  If you do this, it will be a huge addition to your acupuncture, and might even be a more important part of the equation.  It will help you tremendously.

Another strategy that you might try is to get some chewing sticks for your mouth and some Bic pens for your hands.  The chewing sticks are like fancy toothpicks that you can get at the health food store, and they usually have tea tree oil in them and are flavored.  The Bic pens you can keep in your hand and push the clicker button all day long so that your hand has something to do when it wants to hold a cigarette.  These strategies might sound silly, but you will not think so when you are going through nicotine withdrawal!

Should you use laser therapy to quit smoking?

That depends.  If it worked for your friends or your family members, then give it a try.  But basically it is a scam, in much the same way that a meditation class for quitting smoking would be a bit of a scam.

Now is it possible that the meditation might actually help someone to quit smoking?  Sure.  But is it worth paying for?  Does it provide specific benefits to actually help people to quit?

Think about this for a moment.  These same laser treatments that they give in order to supposedly help people to quit smoking, they give the exact same laser treatment in order to help someone to lose weight.

Huh?  What do those two objectives have to do with each other on a physical level?  Not a darn thing.

From a psychological perspective, it might be sort of the same battle for someone who is trying to lose weight as it is for the person who is trying to quit smoking.  But we are talking about a very specific laser treatment that is supposed to physically affect the body in some way so as to help with these objectives.  It cannot work for one and also magically work for the other one too.  That is just silly.

Now, we could stretch the truth a bit here, and look at our meditation example, and say that “yes, meditation could help with quitting smoking.  And it could also help with losing weight.”  But how much?  Really?

Meditation only helps a bit in that it can help with minor stress.  It only helps in an indirect way.  It can still be very helpful for some people, but it does not directly help a person to quit smoking.

In the same way, laser therapy is not a direct method to help you with quitting either.  It might help you out a little, but it is not going to give you any motivation to help you quit.  For example, if someone puts on a nicotine patch, they will get a physical sensation that makes it easier to not smoke.  They can feel the difference at a physical level.  It is noticeable.  It is more than a placebo effect.

With laser therapy, you are not going to get anywhere near this level of reaction.  At the most you might feel a bit of stress relief, but this will be nothing in comparison to the massive cravings you will be experiencing.

Are there any free stop smoking aids available out there?  Well yes there are, but not necessarily in the way you might be thinking.

First of all, unless you have some sort of medical coverage, such as insurance or Medicaid, you are not going to find a lot of stop smoking products out there that are just being handed out freely.  The nicotine replacement market is a multi-billion dollar per year industry.  They are not just giving the stuff away.  This little lesson in economics can help point you to the truth of the matter regarding nicotine replacement products: they are addictive, and based on the immense size of the market, they do not work so well either.

Sure, people have quit with the patch and the gum and the inhalers before, but far more people use these products, go back to smoking, return to these products, and so on.  It is a bit of a cycle for a great number of smokers out there.

So what can you do to get your hands on some free quit smoking aids?  Well for starters, get rid of the idea that these products can actually motivate you to quit.  They can’t.  In some ways, they almost cannot even help you much.  They can help a little.  But if you are expecting an easy quit by using them then you are setting yourself up for relapse anyway.

Second of all, I can recommend two techniques that are completely free that will prove to be just as effective as most of these nicotine based products.  Here are the 2 killer strategies, neither of which will cost you a dime:

1) Start by exercising every single day.  Ouch.  Everyone hates this suggestion but it will absolutely make your quit a thousand times easier.  If you can force yourself to commit to daily exercise, it will have a huge impact on how you feel after you quit smoking.  NOTE: start this daily routine BEFORE you quit smoking.  Do not expect to be able to pull it off on the day you quit, unless you have been doing it all along.

You don’t have to run a marathon.  But you do have to walk, say, at least 30 minutes per day.  Anything more than that is just gravy.

2) Super tip for getting through acute nicotine withdrawal: stay awake for 36 hours minimum after smoking your last cig.  This will insure that when you do crash out, you will sleep straight through the worst part of your withdrawal.  When you finally wake up, you will be through the worst of it.  This works excellent if  you are crazy enough to try it.

Do you want to quit or not?

Does acupuncture quit smoking really work?  Can it help you to quit smoking?

I believe that the answer is yes, it can help you to quit, but it will probably not carry you through the entire process.  This means that you will want to combine this technique with other methods of quitting in order to be insure your success.

The procedure is actually fairly cheap (compared to smoking) and it should be fairly cheap compared to other quit smoking aids.  If you figure out the true cost of the gum or the patch and total up all of the money you would spend on them, then usually acupuncture is pretty inexpensive in comparison.  Of course if you total up the cost of your smoking over the next, say, 10 years, then the cost of acupuncture is essentially free, as it will pay for itself in less than a month for most people (provided they actually stay quit).

You have to realize that getting this procedure done will not actually give you motivation to quit smoking.  You have to generate that on your own.  It can only help you.  It cannot cure you.  People who are seeking motivation through quit smoking aids are actually looking for a cure that does not exist.  Understand the difference here and you could save yourself a lot of time and money.  Only do this if you really want to quit smoking, not if you just wish that you were a non smoker.

My recommendation is that you schedule an appointment to have the acupuncture done, but then do some things to prepare for it before hand.  My 2 suggestions to help the acupuncture work for you are these:

1) Start exercising every single day.  Everyone moans and groans about this because people are lazy and they do not want to put forth such a large effort.  If you really want to quit smoking then you are going to need the boost in endorphins that comes from daily exercise.  Without this you are not going to have a way to replace the “feel-good” chemicals that you used to get from cigarettes.

2) Stay awake for 36 hours after smoking your final cigarette.  This is an excellent tip that will carry you through the worst of your withdrawals.  How?  Because if you stay up for 36 hours after your final smoke, then you will sleep long and hard through the worst portion of your withdrawal from nicotine.  It is the perfect strategy to get you through the toughest part of your quit.

These 2 strategies can work with acupuncture to help you to stay quit for good.

Can nicotine nasal spray help you to quit smoking?  The short answer is that yes, it most certainly can.  As always, if you think there is a small possibility that this product might help you, do not hesitate any further.  Jump on the idea and go buy it and try it out.  You are wasting time, money, and years of your life by not taking action.  If you think it might help you to quit smoking then you owe to yourself to stop messing around and take action right now.

There are some pros and cons regarding the nasal spray over other nicotine products, such as the patch or the gum.  Essentially the smoker is using all of these nicotine replacement products in order to put nicotine into their system after they have quit smoking to help ease the withdrawal symptoms.  The idea is that they can medicate their symptoms and not end up relapsing on cigarettes.  Now as far as the nicotine spray is concerned, it does have the initial side effect that when you shoot it into your nose, it is going to burn quite badly for the first few days.  After 3 to 5 days of doing this, however, this side effect goes away.  Now you might be wondering, why subject yourself to this burning sensation if there are alternatives like the gum or the patch?

The reason is because the spray works much faster, and that can make a huge difference for some smokers.  They did some studies and found that for really heavy smokers, and for smokers who were more deeply addicted, the nasal spray was much more effective than the other, “slower” delivery methods such as the patch.  The reason is the same reason that a person will snort cocaine instead of eating it.  It is absorbed extremely quickly into the bloodstream through the nasal passages, so it brings the same level of instant relief that smoking a cigarette would bring.

Now due to this fast acting property of the inhaler, it has a higher risk of addiction than the alternatives.  But is that such a bad thing, really?  You would rather be addicted to this nasal spray than to the cigarettes, because the cigarettes will kill you in the end, and the nasal spray is not carcinogenic.  If you end up getting hooked on the nasal spray but have kicked the cigarettes, then that is still progress.

If you are thinking about it, don’t hesitate.  Try it out and it might just change your life.

Can nicotine inhalers help you to quit smoking?  Yes and no.  They are something that you should try if you are still smoking cigarettes and think that they might help.

One thing that I want to point out is that you should always be pushing yourself to take action in trying to quit.  If you are hesitating to wonder whether or not something will work, or if there is a better alternative, then you have the wrong attitude about this.  You need to take immediate action and you need to keep taking action until you successfully quit.  Your smoking is costing you a fortune, in more ways than one.  You can and should do anything you can in order to try and quit.

If you think the inhaler will help, try the inhaler.  If it fails for you, move on to something else and try that.  Try cold turkey.  Try taking a vacation.  Try the patch, try the medications, try hypnosis.

Whatever you do, don’t just smoke.  Do not allow yourself to just smoke.  That is the worst thing you could possibly do.

So by all means, give the nicotine inhaler a try.  It is worth the effort.  If you try it out and you successfully quit smoking, and you end up never taking another puff, then how much was that experiment worth to you?  A thousand dollars?   Not even close.  Try several hundred thousand dollars worth of future medical bills and probably several years worth of  your life.  How much can you purchase one year of  your life for?  You can’t.  It has infinite value.  When you die, you can’t cash in some of your left over money and buy some more life.  Every extra day is precious.  And if you continue to smoke cigarettes instead of quitting, then you are removing an average of 7 to 10 years from the end of your life.  If you quit now you can reverse that, sometimes fully in some cases.

So yeah, the point is not “should I try the nicotine inhaler or should I try the quit smoking patches?”  The point is, try them all.  Use anything and everything at your disposal in order to quit smoking.  Do not try something out and fail at it and say “oh well, guess I was just meant to smoke.”  That is signing your own death warrant.  The only reasonable course of action is to push yourself to try new techniques to quit until you find something that works for you.

The benefits of smoking? Don’t you mean: the benefits of quitting smoking?

Well actually, there are some benefits to smoking, and if we take a look at them, then we might be able to learn more about what we need to do in order to successfully quit.

1) Weight loss – smoking helps you lose weight, there is no doubt about it. I am not sure in how many different ways that it does this, but one way is that every time you take a hit from a cigarette, our brain releases a tiny bit of our stored fat and turns it into usable energy. Now that is a simplification there but the general idea is that we can actually “feed” ourselves with smoking because it somehow triggers this conversion of fat. Most smokers will recognize this is happening because they can wake up each day and simply drink coffee and smoke all day long and skip both breakfast and lunch. They don’t have to eat any food at all until dinner. Now all smokers are different but many of them will function this way. Obviously this is not a very healthy way to live but you can see that it would result in tremendous weight loss.

Pretty much everyone gains at least 5 to 10 pounds after quitting smoking.

The only way to counteract that is to take action. Change your eating habits a bit, eat a bit healthier when you quit smoking, and add in some daily exercise. If you do a little bit of both then things should even out, and you won’t see much weight gain, if any. But you have to actively fight against it.

2) Social interaction - smoking provides for social interaction. It provides an excuse for it. If you quit, you will miss out on the “smoking circle” outside of the office, or where ever you used to smoke with others. That can be hard, so don’t give it up. Buy some toothpicks or chewing sticks at the health food store and take them out there when they all go out to smoke and socialize with them. Don’t allow yourself to feel deprived of this social element. Stay in the loop and don’t mind the smoking.

3) Stress reduction - this one is actually a myth, cigarettes don’t actually reduce stress. Those who are hooked on cigarettes think that they do, because nicotine withdrawal is so stressful, and smoking a cigarette removes the stress of withdrawal. But this “stress reduction” is not a benefit of smoking, because the nicotine withdrawal causes the stress!

Can you use a laser treatment to stop smoking?  Sure you can.  It works in much the same way that meditation helps people to overcome physical pain.

Huh?  What does that mean?  It means that it is largely a placebo effect, and if you pay good money for a laser treatment to help you quit smoking, then you might get good results simply based on the money you paid.

The problem with laser treatments for smoking is that they have not done any rigorous studies yet.  They have been asked to produce some studies to verify that the technique actually helps people, and they have failed to do so.

Basically what needs to happen is this: a group of people needs to be split into two, and they all must be smokers who desire to quit.  One group receives the laser treatment, the other group receives a “fake” laser treatment.  Neither group is told whether they are getting the fake or the laser treatment.  In fact, the people administering the study cannot be allowed to know which laser treatment they are administering.  Only the organizers of the research, who will eventually collect all the data and determine the results, will know which group had the real laser treatment and which had the fake laser.

The laser treatment industry will not subject themselves to this level of testing (known as a double-blind study, which is a very high standard) because they know they will fail the test.  They are selling people something, but it is not a very helpful laser treatment.  What they are selling is a worthless laser treatment that people believe has the power to help them.  Does it?  Only to the extent that the placebo effect can work on someone.  Only to the extent that they want their 500 dollars to really help them to quit smoking.

What is the alternative?  The alternative is to use hard work and serious action to quit smoking.  Set a quit date, find support systems, start exercising every day, and find other helpful strategies on this website that will allow you to put in a ton of effort and get the results you really want.  Sound like fun?  Not really.

Quitting smoking is actually a lot of work, so most people would rather pay 500 dollars and have a laser shot into them, in the hopes of a magic cure.  Talk about a waste of money.  If this stuff really worked it would cost 5 thousand dollars, not 5 hundred.  Save your money.

There is a quit smoking shot treatment that smokers can get in order to help them quit smoking.

“Sounds great,” you think.  A shot that will help me to quit smoking.  This is sort of like the magic wand approach.  We want something to come along and make it easier for us to quit smoking.  And of course, this is a reasonable thought on the part of the smoker.  There is nothing wrong with wanting some help in overcoming our addiction.

But in this case, you have to understand what really happened here.  This is not the case of drug research scientists being in the lab, researching new compounds and chemicals, and they stumble on something that they think might be of help to the smoker who is trying to quit.  That would have been a real medical discovery that eventually led to a new drug or a new type of treatment.

Instead, what happened here is that the marketing people said “Let’s see….we already have a patch they can wear, and a gum they can chew, and all sorts of pills to quit smoking.  What if we could give them a shot of some sort?”  So they researched what medications would possible be appropriate for a smoker who is trying to quit and they came up with 2 medications that they could package into one shot.  One of them is basically just an antihistamine to help people calm down, and is really no different than taking an allergy pill that you can buy over the counter.  The other medication is not really proven to help in any way, and just seems to be along for the ride.

So in this case, you have to see that they are trying to make money with this one more than they are trying to help smokers.  They did not find medication and say “huh, this would work well as a shot.”  Instead, they designed the idea of a shot to quit smoking and then went and found some medications that might be suitable for it.

I would ignore the idea of a quit smoking shot and put your energy into other quit smoking strategies.  To be honest, the most powerful technique and strategy for quitting is probably the thing that everyone likes the least: start exercising vigorously once a day and stick to it.  Nobody wants to do that, and no one can stick to a once-per-day schedule.  But if you can, this will make a huge difference in helping you to quit smoking….much more so than a shot with practically random medications selected for it.

Does stop smoking laser treatment really work?  This is the procedure where you pay a couple of hundred dollars to go into an office and have them shoot a “cold” laser into your body at various acupuncture points.  It is a “cold” laser because it does not do any cutting or burning of the skin.  Instead, the laser is thought to stimulate endorphin production, thus making you “feel better” during nicotine withdrawal.

Well take a look at what else these same clinics are doing with their laser therapy….they are using them to promote weight loss in people.

Huh?

What does quitting smoking and losing weight have to do with each other?  Since when does success in one area correlate to success in the other?  Is there some secret link in our biochemistry that has to do with both quitting smoking and losing weight?

I don’t think so.  No medical journal or scientific study has ever produced such evidence.  Nor have there any been any studies that show any sort of success rates for the stop smoking laser treatments.  They industry is refusing to have clinical trials conducted, probably because they know they will get lousy results with them.

A clinical trial would include people who are getting a “fake” laser treatment as well.  So basically, if they had similar success rates to the “real laser treatment,” then it would prove that it is no better than a placebo.

This might give you an insight into the way that many quit smoking products work.  They might give you a mental boost, but in most ways, they do not actually do anything to help you quit.  The core motivation has to come from within.  People secretly hope that a quit smoking aid will give them the desire to quit smoking.  It never works this way.  You have to have the desire for yourself first, and then follow that up with a strong decision to quit and real action.

Now if you want to know what is really going to help you to quit, take a look at the basic facts about quitting.  Many of the people who have enjoyed long term success in quitting actually quit cold turkey.  What does this tell us?  Quite a lot, actually.  It shows that it is not about gimmicks or new technologies that are going to suddenly cure our problems.  You have to roll up your sleeves and make a real effort if you want success with this.