Busting the Myths of Nicotine Replacement Therapy

Nicotine Replacement Therapy (NRT) has grown into an $800-million-a-year industry in the US, and last year absorbed $13 million of New Zealand taxpayers’ money in government subsidies as part of the fight against tobacco. This is despite a recent five-year study by the Harvard School of Public Health that reports NRT has no lasting benefit for smokers trying to quit the habit, and is no more effective in helping people quit smoking over the long term than using willpower alone. The study goes a step further to report that heavy smokers who used NRT without counseling were twice as likely to relapse as heavy smokers who did not use NRT products to quit smoking. “Nicotine patches, gums and lozenges do not break a smoker’s addiction to nicotine,” says Allen Carr stop smoking therapist, Vickie Macrae. “Cigarettes are essentially a package for nicotine delivery. NRT products do the same thing, just in different packaging.” That’s an important message in the lead-up to World No Tobacco Day this 31 May as smokers search for effective solutions to quit the habit for good. “NRT products are not a magic pill,” says Macrae. “Physically, smokers are in nicotine withdrawal every night in their sleep, but it doesn’t cause pain or even wake you up. The real struggle going on is the mental tug-of-war that comes with quitting. There’s no way on the planet that a patch, pill or piece of gum can remove that.” Vickie explains that to successfully quit smoking, addicts must adopt a psychological approach that addresses not only the physical addiction to nicotine, but also the mental and emotional addiction to smoking. “If you ask 10 different people why they smoke, they’ll come up with 10 different answers... Often people say that smoking relieves stress without realising that it’s nicotine that causes all those spikes and troughs in your mood in the first place.” “To break the addiction you must address that mental tug-of-war between what you want to do, think you should do, but believe you can’t do. That’s what causes the fear, panic and anxiety that smokers go through when quitting, and there’s no quick-fix patch or piece of gum for that.” “To quit successfully, people first need to disregard everything they’ve been told about quitting smoking,” says Macrae. “Contrary to popular belief, quitting smoking is not hard if you know the right way to do it.”