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Trying To Quit Smoking? Should You Cut Down Or Go Cold Turkey?

Most specialist smoking cessation services advise patients to select a quit date and quit smoking completely on that day (usually along with medication), but many smokers prefer the idea of cutting down gradually. What are the pros and cons?

I theory, cutting down gradually might provide a “softer landing” in that it might spread out the nicotine withdrawal over a longer period, rather than giving the nicotine receptors an abrupt shock of no nicotine. It also seems to fit with common sense that it might be easier to change the behavior gradually rather than all at once. Read more »

This post, Trying To Quit Smoking? Should You Cut Down Or Go Cold Turkey?, was originally published on Healthine.com by Jonathan Foulds, Ph.D..

How Cigarette Nicotine Affects The Brain

I was recently asked to review a new textbook on Nicotine Psychopharmacology, containing 18 very thorough chapters describing the latest evidence on the effects of smoking and nicotine on the brain and behavior. Much of it, though interesting, was a very heavy read. But it occurred to me that it might be useful to try to summarize what the 544 pages in this new book suggests about the effects of nicotine and the reasons smokers get addicted. So here is an attempt to describe how nicotine addiction works, in simplified terms.

When a smoker inhales nicotine from a cigarette, the drug is carried to the brain in highly concentrated form within around 10-15 seconds. The drug then Read more »

This post, How Cigarette Nicotine Affects The Brain, was originally published on Healthine.com by Jonathan Foulds, Ph.D..

Massachusetts Leads The Way In Smoking Cessation

Across the country health insurance coverage for smoking cessation treatment – both counseling and medications – has been extremely patchy. For example, we ask all the new patients attending our smoking cessation clinic in New Jersey if their insurance covers smoking cessation treatment, and the vast majority have no idea. Typically its also not easy for either the patient or provider to find out either. It doesn’t just depend on the insurer, but on the plan, the type of service, what they’ve already had in terms of preventive care. We’ve had many occasions where we call the insurer twice on the same day and get a different answer. And New Jersey is a state that is supposed to have relatively good insurance coverage for tobacco cessation! So it’s a mess nationwide, and the net result is that fewer patients get the treatment they need because they are put of by the uncertainty about the cost and difficulty finding out how much it is. Read more »

This post, Massachusetts Leads The Way In Smoking Cessation, was originally published on Healthine.com by Jonathan Foulds, Ph.D..

What Are People Really Using NRT (Nicotine Replacement Therapies) For?

Nicotine replacement therapies (NRTs: patch, gum, lozenge, nasal spray and inhaler) are intended to be used to help smokers to quit smoking completely. But an international report was recently published, finding that of the 17% of smokers who had used NRT in the previous year, approximately a third had used it for reasons other than quitting smoking.

The study was based on a survey of 6532 smokers in Australia, Canada, United Kingdom and the United States, and found similar patterns in each country. The patch was by far the most commonly used NRT (70%), followed by the gum. Overall, about 8% of NRT users had used NRT just to reduce their smoking, and around 8% had used it to help them cope in situations where they couldn’t smoke. The report stated that, Read more »

This post, What Are People Really Using NRT (Nicotine Replacement Therapies) For?, was originally published on Healthine.com by Jonathan Foulds, Ph.D..

Quitting Smoking? Your Nicotine receptors Take Over A Month To Normalize

Nicotine withdrawal symptoms typically peak in the first week of abstinence and return to normal at around 3-4 weeks. It has long been known that certain nicotinic receptors (particularly the beta-2 subtype) are closely involved in nicotine addiction, and that smokers have a larger number of nicotine receptors in their brains than non-smokers. When the smoker quits, this large number of vacant, unstimulated receptors is believed to be involved in the resulting craving and distressing withdrawal (irritability, restlessness, depression, anxiety, poor concentration etc).

Earlier this year, a study published by Drs Kelly Cosgrove, Julie Staley and colleagues at Yale University, provided evidence on the time course of normalization of these receptors after quitting smoking. Read more »

This post, Quitting Smoking? Your Nicotine receptors Take Over A Month To Normalize, was originally published on Healthine.com by Jonathan Foulds, Ph.D..

Latest Interviews

IDEA Labs: Medical Students Take The Lead In Healthcare Innovation

It’s no secret that doctors are disappointed with the way that the U.S. healthcare system is evolving. Most feel helpless about improving their work conditions or solving technical problems in patient care. Fortunately one young medical student was undeterred by the mountain of disappointment carried by his senior clinician mentors…

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How To Be A Successful Patient: Young Doctors Offer Some Advice

I am proud to be a part of the American Resident Project an initiative that promotes the writing of medical students residents and new physicians as they explore ideas for transforming American health care delivery. I recently had the opportunity to interview three of the writing fellows about how to…

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Latest Book Reviews

Book Review: Is Empathy Learned By Faking It Till It’s Real?

I m often asked to do book reviews on my blog and I rarely agree to them. This is because it takes me a long time to read a book and then if I don t enjoy it I figure the author would rather me remain silent than publish my…

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The Spirit Of The Place: Samuel Shem’s New Book May Depress You

When I was in medical school I read Samuel Shem s House Of God as a right of passage. At the time I found it to be a cynical yet eerily accurate portrayal of the underbelly of academic medicine. I gained comfort from its gallows humor and it made me…

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Eat To Save Your Life: Another Half-True Diet Book

I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a…

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