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posted by chromas on Saturday April 20 2019, @12:40AM   Printer-friendly
from the C10H19N2 dept.

Nicotine Replacement: When Quitting Cigarettes, Consider Using More Nicotine, Not Less:

When delivered through cigarettes, nicotine is considered to be one of the most addictive substances on Earth, so it may seem odd to suggest that people should use more, rather than less, to quit smoking. A recent review of the research, however, has found just that.

Nicotine replacement therapy, known as NRT, has been used to help people safely quit smoking for more than 20 years. It can be prescribed by a doctor but, in many countries, is also available to buy from grocery stores and pharmacies. The Cochrane review (Cochrane assesses evidence on healthcare interventions and summarises the findings) looked at the best ways to use NRT to quit smoking – and found three ways in which using more nicotine might help:

  1. Use two forms of NRT rather than one. [...]
  2. Start to use NRT before stopping smoking. [...]
  3. Higher doses of NRT may help some people.

If you don't get a "happy" jolt from the release of dopamine (because the levels of nicotine never dropped to a stage of craving), the perceived "reward" for smoking is reduced/removed.


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  • (Score: 1) by Coward, Anonymous on Saturday April 20 2019, @01:00AM (1 child)

    by Coward, Anonymous (7017) on Saturday April 20 2019, @01:00AM (#832388) Journal

    Once had a shuttle bus driver try to butter me up to pay for his nicotine patches. Usually, customers give a tip if they've had a good experience, not if you make them uncomfortable talking about money trouble.

    • (Score: 2) by Subsentient on Saturday April 20 2019, @03:50AM

      by Subsentient (1111) on Saturday April 20 2019, @03:50AM (#832438) Homepage Journal

      As someone badly addicted to nicotine, I'm sorry. Without it I get angry easier but I'd never debase myself like that, and I've been without long enough to know. It's not like meth people.

      --
      "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by ilPapa on Saturday April 20 2019, @01:45AM (11 children)

    by ilPapa (2366) on Saturday April 20 2019, @01:45AM (#832398) Journal

    I had tried all sorts of nicotine replacements to quit smoking. None of them worked a damn bit. I patched, I chewed gum, I vaped, I even dipped.

    When I finally quit, the only thing that worked was just quitting. My fears about nicotine withdrawal were a lot worse than the reality. I was actually a little ashamed that I had waited so long.

    If you quit, you're going to feel better right away. After a little while, you're going to feel a LOT better. Also, I lost 15 pounds after quitting.

    --
    You are still welcome on my lawn.
    • (Score: 4, Informative) by c0lo on Saturday April 20 2019, @02:05AM (5 children)

      by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Saturday April 20 2019, @02:05AM (#832406) Journal

      If you quit, you're going to feel better right away. After a little while, you're going to feel a LOT better. Also, I lost 15 pounds after quitting.

      You are atypical or a big liar, most people usually:
        1. go through withdrawal symptoms that aren't fitting the "feel good right away" claim
        2. gain weight after quitting [medlineplus.gov]

      --
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 20 2019, @02:48AM (3 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 20 2019, @02:48AM (#832431)

        Nicotine withdrawal is really not that bad... I've quit for months at a time (longest was near a year), and it's really not hard at all from a withdrawal perspective. It's the social aspect and living in an area with a higher amount of smokers that makes it hard to stay nicotine-free. Now that I'm vaping, I probably will never quit though - I love the high of nicotine and I'm not coughing shit up from smoking, stinking like smoke, or spending money on it daily so there's very little downside.

        • (Score: 5, Interesting) by c0lo on Saturday April 20 2019, @04:22AM

          by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Saturday April 20 2019, @04:22AM (#832442) Journal

          Nicotine withdrawal is really not that bad... I've quit for months at a time (longest was near a year), and it's really not hard at all from a withdrawal perspective.

          Everybody seems to be different in this regard.
          In my case, cold sweats, occasional (but atrocious) headaches, feeling generally unwell and in a blue mood, cough fits. The hardest 6 weeks of my life, symptoms slowly receded afterwards; and after 3 months I relapsed.

          --
          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
        • (Score: 3, Informative) by mhajicek on Saturday April 20 2019, @06:34AM (1 child)

          by mhajicek (51) on Saturday April 20 2019, @06:34AM (#832463)

          Vaping can destroy your lungs too.

          --
          The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 20 2019, @11:50AM

            by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 20 2019, @11:50AM (#832512)

            Show me some evidence that isn't FUD about popcorn lung.

      • (Score: 2) by gtomorrow on Saturday April 20 2019, @12:45PM

        by gtomorrow (2230) on Saturday April 20 2019, @12:45PM (#832533)

        Not that anybody cares, but my experience was exactly like IlPapa. One day, after smoking since I was 15, I just stopped. Every time I went for a cigarette, I stopped and said to myself "Wait, I don't do that anymore." Three or four days of that and I stopped smoking. I also dropped about 15 pounds, but that was due to increased physical activity (just walking). And I felt great!

        This was in 2007...that lasted until 2012. Starting up again was the stupidest thing I ever did. Like the PSA said, "If you don't smoke, don't start. If you do smoke, stop."

    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday April 20 2019, @02:34AM (1 child)

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Saturday April 20 2019, @02:34AM (#832426)

      My grandfather quit after he started coughing up blood regularly.

      My uncle (his son) started around age 18 with his girlfriend/wife, and quit around age 25 because he remembered what happened to his father.

      My aunt (his wife) kept smoking until she was ~35, played around with tar filters and stuff before finally quitting - but, she gained a ton of weight after she quit.

      I'm pretty sure I never smoked tobacco (and only smoked other things in college), but I have this bizarre quasi-memory from a stressful time in my life where I seem to remember smoking just a few cigarettes, maybe only one pack altogether, but... I don't remember where I kept the pack, I don't remember buying it, or what brand it was, or throwing out the wrapper, or how I lit the cigarettes, or whether or not I inhaled some clean air after the smoke... like I learned in college, and I don't remember what I did with the butts - I certainly didn't leave them on the ground outside the garage where I have these memories of going to smoke. So, I'm pretty sure something in my mind just created this memory of going out for a smoke when things were getting to be too much, but I don't think I actually did it.

      --
      🌻🌻 [google.com]
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 20 2019, @06:14AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 20 2019, @06:14AM (#832460)

        My grandfather quit after he started coughing up blood regularly.

        My uncle (his son) started around age 18 with his girlfriend/wife, and quit around age 25 because he remembered what happened to his father.

        My aunt (his wife) kept smoking until she was ~35, played around with tar filters and stuff before finally quitting - but, she gained a ton of weight after she quit.

        My father smoked until he was bedridden with stage 4 lung cancer that was attacking his nervous system and he couldn't walk any more. Watching someone (especially someone you love) die slowly and painfully like that was one of the hardest things I ever had to do.

        You'd think that'd get me to stop smoking, but more than 20 years later, I'm still at it. Go figure.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by stormwyrm on Saturday April 20 2019, @06:38AM (1 child)

      by stormwyrm (717) on Saturday April 20 2019, @06:38AM (#832464) Journal

      I didn't use any kind of nicotine replacements to try to quit. I tried to quit cold turkey but after a few weeks the cravings were such that I couldn't really sustain it. What did work was gradually reducing smoking over a period of time. I was never a heavy smoker, and had already been on around 1-3 sticks a day for years, and then I spent two years gradually cutting, at first spending half a year smoking strictly one stick a day, then try to skip every other day without a smoke, then two days without one, then a week without one, and then, around 2012, I finally smoked my last stick. After 12 years of smoking, that was the end. Nearly seven years now without a cigarette. But I didn't lose weight after that... I'd rather gained quite a bit soon after quitting, my weight going up from 78 kg to nearly 90 by 2015, by which time I got a gym membership and started seriously working out and that's when I started dropping weight. But yes, I did feel a lot better once it was finally over.

      --
      Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 20 2019, @12:03PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 20 2019, @12:03PM (#832517)

        1-3 cigs per day isnt even smoking in my opinion.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 20 2019, @11:59AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 20 2019, @11:59AM (#832515)

      Yes, same here. You just have to quit, not play games or waste money on crap like this.

  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday April 20 2019, @02:25AM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Saturday April 20 2019, @02:25AM (#832418)

    Some researchers were studying how light/dark patterns affect mouse sleep cycles. They built a big, like 6x6, experimental cage setup and controlled the lighting in each enclosure - measuring the occupant's sleep wake patterns. They had all kinds of light dark patterns, mostly on 24 hour cycles. The one graph that stood out for me was a mouse that was exposed to 10 minutes of light followed by 23:50 of dark - after a few days, that mouse settled on a pattern where it would fall asleep almost immediately after the light pulse, slept a normal-ish 10 hours, then would wake up and do it all over again - basically put to sleep by the falling edge of the light pulse.

    If you're trying to quit nicotine, it might make sense to get a good solid hit of it before switching off altogether - kind of like ripping off the bandage all at once, rather than drawing it out a little at a time.

    --
    🌻🌻 [google.com]
  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 20 2019, @03:25AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 20 2019, @03:25AM (#832437)

    I smoked cigarettes for years.

    I quit. I didn't use any patches or any other substitute sources of nicotine.

    The first three weeks of quitting were undeniably difficult. After that doing without nicotine was a lot easier.

    Bottom line : difficult stuff IS difficult. But when it comes to engaging in self-harm because you lack the self-control to abstain from using nicotine, it is impossible
    for me to have sympathy for people who claim "they can't do it. BULLSHIT, you pathetic pieces of garbage are WEAK and you don't have the strength to make a decision
    and stick to it. So the sooner cancer removes your sort from the gene pool, the better. The human race will be better off without you in it.

    • (Score: 3, Funny) by Subsentient on Saturday April 20 2019, @03:59AM

      by Subsentient (1111) on Saturday April 20 2019, @03:59AM (#832439) Homepage Journal
      --
      "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 20 2019, @04:43AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 20 2019, @04:43AM (#832447)

      Don't hold back, friend. Tell us how you really feel.

    • (Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Saturday April 20 2019, @05:24AM

      by realDonaldTrump (6614) on Saturday April 20 2019, @05:24AM (#832456) Homepage Journal

      I tell my children, no drugs, no alcohol, no cigarettes. I see what it does to people when they lose control. I'm not a drinker. I can honestly say I never had a beer in my life. It's one of my only good traits. I never had a glass of alcohol. Can you imagine, if I had, what a mess I’d be? I’d be the world’s worst. I had a brother, Fred. Great guy, best-looking guy, best personality. Much better than mine. But he had a problem. He had a problem with alcohol. And he would tell me, "don’t drink. Don’t drink." RIP Fred!!

  • (Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Saturday April 20 2019, @04:57AM

    by NotSanguine (285) <NotSanguineNO@SPAMSoylentNews.Org> on Saturday April 20 2019, @04:57AM (#832452) Homepage Journal

    This paper is quite interesting:
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3116468/ [nih.gov]

    This article provides a comparison of nicotine vs. heroin:
    https://whyquit.com/whyquit/A_Henningfield_Benowitz.html [whyquit.com]

    And this article claims that nicotine isn't dangerous, and that it may, in fact beneficial:
    https://www.forbes.com/sites/sallysatel/2015/06/19/nicotine-can-save-lives/ [forbes.com]

    --
    No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
  • (Score: 2) by Farkus888 on Sunday April 21 2019, @10:24AM

    by Farkus888 (5159) on Sunday April 21 2019, @10:24AM (#832907)

    High nicotine ecig is how I quit. I just needed to get to where the smell and taste of the real thing was gross. Once I was safe there I tapered down to no nicotine then nothing.

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