What a load of nonsense! 2

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The 10 worst bits of advice about stopping smoking – continued!

Last week I gave you ten waste-of-time tips that you can find on any website about stopping smoking. Well, I hope I’m not boring you but my own article prompted me to keep looking and I want to share some more with you. Just to add to the fun, I’ve added a few comments of my own. With thanks also to Jo, who rang looking for a Leeds hypnotherapist, for pointing some great websites out to us.

1.Have a shower (uhuh, feel clean, then smoke a cigarette)

2. Read a book (if you can concentrate)

3. Count up how much money you’re saving not smoking (assuming you’re not smoking)

4. Do some exercise (while taking a shower and reading a book?)

5. Clean your house (how many times – they don’t say)

6. Write a letter or send an email (write a letter and use it to roll a cigarette)

7. Go somewhere you can’t smoke, like a cinema (and smoke when you come out)

8. Cook yourself something special and savour every mouthful (and count up how much money you’re spending on all this extra food)

9. Do a crossword or puzzle (OR???)

10. Remind yourself about the medical conditions smoking can contribute to (seriously now, they list Crohn’s disease here. I have Crohn’s disease, and I can tell you this is nonsense, it has nothing to do with smoking. Trust me, I know this stuff)

Now a list of long-term distractions:

1. Take up a hobby that keeps your hands busy, such as painting or learning a musical instrument (and remember, artists and pianists never smoke while they’re working!)

2. Plan how you’re going to spend the money you’re saving (what, after all that special food, not to mention the piano?)

3. Decorate your home and get rid of the nicotine stains on your walls and ceilings (oh yes, and where do you put the grand piano while your doing that? And by the way, they’re not nicotine stains, they’re tar stains.)

4. Take up a sport and enjoy how much fitter you are (if you’re a 76-six year old with arthritis do take this carefully)

5. Join a stop-smoking group through your local NHS stop-smoking service (oops, they’ve given themselves away!)

OK, here are some more:

1. Write a list of reasons why you want to stop (this should keep you busy for, let me see, thirty seconds?)

2. Set a date for stopping (you know, like you did last time, and the time before)

3. Tell everyone that you are giving up smoking (or don’t, in case you don’t. Remember how silly you looked last time?)

4. Get rid of ashtrays, lighters and all cigarettes (and never, ever, go into a corner shop, garage or supermarket)

5. Be prepared for some withdrawal symptoms (and …..?)

6. Anticipate a cough (and this helps you to stop smoking how?)

7. Be aware of situations in which you are likely to want to smoke (like waking up, getting out of bed, having the first cup of coffee, waiting for the bus to work, getting off the bus to work ….)

8. Take one day at a time (there are only 365 in a year, remember)

9. Be positive (that you don’t want to smoke, or you do?)

10. Food – some people worry about gaining weight (and some don’t worry, but still do)

11. Don’t despair if you fail (remember, the last time you will ever smoke will be at the crematorium)

11. Stop-smoking clinics are available on the NHS (ah yes, the NHS, funny you should mention them, because …)

12. Various medicines can increase your chance of quitting (aha, I wondered when we were going to come to these)

Finally, here’s another batch. I won’t tell you whose website they’re on until the end, although I have a feeling it won’t exactly come as a surprise:

1. Know why you want to stop (hang on, haven’t we heard this somewhere before?)

2. Going cold turkey isn’t easy (this is a tip?)

3. Consider nicotine replacement therapy (they mean products, of course)

4. Ask about prescription medication (this isn’t a commercial by any chance, is it?)

5. Don’t go it alone (drive off Beachy Head with a friend)

6. Manage stress (oh, so that’s the answer to the stress of stopping smoking)

7. Avoid lighting up triggers (also avoid lighting up cigarettes)

8. Clean the house (boy is your house going to be clean)

9. Try and try again (and don’t forget, buy your products here)

10. Get moving (what, you’ve just cleaned the house to death and now they want you to move?)

11. Eat fruit and veg (and do not try to light carrot sticks)

12. Choose your reward (um, packet of twenty?)

13. Do it for your health (I bet you hadn’t thought of that one!)

OK, now I’ll tell you – this is from Boots, who if I remember rightly flog nicotine replacement products.

Now look, if you think I’m being just a bit facetious, you would be right, but hey, who’s to stop me? My reason for all this is not that the advice is wrong (actually, some of it is) but that it’s pathetic. I said this last week but it’s worth repeating; there is plenty smokers need to be learning without wasting their time on these platitudes. For at least some real advice visit www.stopsmokinguk.org.

News

We are pleased to announce the launch of a new website specially for our Manchester hypnotherapy branches. At present this has details of our Sale and Rochdale hypnotherapists, but will be further developed as we add more branches in the Manchester area. Find this at www.hypnotherapymanchester.org.uk.

 

What a load of nonsense!

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The 10 worst bits of advice about stopping smoking

You see it every New Year, every National No-Smoking Day, and every time there is a new stop-smoking drug product being launched. I’m referring to the waste-of-time articles and advice that are supposed to help you to stop smoking.

I’ve been doing this work for more than twenty years, and, as the author of three books on the subject of smoking cessation, I am still amazed at the crassness of some of the information and advice given to smokers. Here are some examples, culled from the websites of organisations big enough to employ people capable of intelligent thought, but not bothering.

1. Take time to plan. Pick your quit date a few weeks ahead and mark it on the calendar.

2. Get some exercise every day.

3. Eat a balanced diet, drink lots of water and get plenty of sleep.

4. Ask family friends and co-workers for their help and support.

5. Write a list of the reasons you want to stop.

6. Tell everyone that you are giving up smoking.

7. Get rid of ashtrays, lighters and all cigarettes.

8. Take one day at a time

9. Be positive.

10. Don’t despair if you fail.

Now there’s nothing wrong with any of this advice. You can’t actually fault any of it. It’s just totally useless. You are trying to come off the most addictive drug on the planet, that has created a deep level of psychological dependence on the delivery method, and I’m afraid I find it hard to see ‘take one day at a time’ as anything but a platitude.

Of course, the real reason for all this nonsense is not just that the purveyors don’t know any better, it’s that they are all funded by pharmaceutical companies, who have product to sell. Any real information or advice would simply get in the way of that product.

There’s a huge amount of advice that would be really helpful (see www.stopsmokinguk.org for some, for example), so what is the effect of the awful information being peddled to smokers? Well, inevitably, most smokers are simply disheartened by it. They see the same nonsense not only on the Web, but regularly regurgitated in magazines and every year for National No-Smoking Day in the daily papers, who all feel they have to say something on the subject but have no idea what. The newspapers, in fact, simply take their information from the NHS / pharmaceutical industry combine without giving it a thought.

Is it any wonder the success of smoking cessation services is so pathetic? Is it any wonder that smokers stop trying to stop? They get drug products from their GP and fail to stop, then they see all this nonsense, and they are not stupid, they realise that no-one is seriously trying to help. What the ‘professionals’ charged with the responsibility for helping are doing is self-serving paper-shuffling. It keeps them in work and that, for them, is good enough.

I listed ten awful bits of so-called advice above, but to be honest I could have given you twenty or thirty, but after a while you would begin to see that actually they don’t really vary that much. In the end it’s the same stuff expressed in different ways.

What troubles me, apart for the obvious problem that the NHS and the media are treating smokers like idiots, is that at the end of the day it all just doesn’t work. When are the media, for example, going to wake up to the fact that smoking is not ‘naughty but nice’, something that can be treated as a bit of a joke? When are they going to treat it as drug addiction? And when, therefore, are they going to do some research when they plan a piece on stopping smoking, which might, at long last, show some respect for their readers?

I might apologise to my readers for this rant, but I do not feel inclined to do that. This stuff is important, and it’s time someone said it. As I said earlier, there is genuine help, information and advice that smokers need and could be made available to them. We at the Institute have all of this available to us, and we want to make it available to smokers, but because of the very limited resources we have that is somewhat restricted. So go to the website I mentioned above, tell other smokers about it, and let’s get people reading real information about this very serious problem.

 

Branch of the week

We have two branches in Croydon, one for acupuncture and one for hypnotherapy, but on this occasion I want to mention June, our South Croydon hypnotherapist, who recently complete her second year of membership. June has been particularly successful on behalf of the Institute and we wish her well for her next two years.

 

Branch update

After a brief hiatus we now have a Brighton hypnotherapist again. Our Hove hypnotherapist, Helen, is now on maternity leave, so it’s all happening in Brighton for now.

stopsmokinguk is launched!

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An exciting new information and advice service for all smokers

The Institute is pleased and proud to announce the launch of a new and exciting service for smokers called stopsmokinguk. Although this is not a part of the NSCI, we have been involved in the planning and development of it from the birth of the idea through to its launch.

For too long, smoking cessation information and advice has been of one kind or another – either it’s from the NHS / pharmaceutical company combine, so it focuses solely on drug products, or it’s therapists who want to sell their service. The NSCI itself has been breaking out of this impasse for some years by offering a range of services to smokers, including hypnotherapy and acupuncture, but these are still private services so it is only one side of the coin.

stopsmokinguk is a national information and advice service, entirely Web-based, that at last can give smokers the full spectrum of information on every stop-smoking method, and help them decide what is best for them and how to get it, whether it’s private services or National Health Service.

We at the National Smoking Cessation Institute decided to support this project at the outset because it conforms to our own ethic, which is that smokers need all the information they can get so they can make their own decisions.

stopsmokinguk incorporates a number of elements that smokers can work through, from understanding the issues involved in how to stop smoking through to locating a suitable stop-smoking service in their area.

The National Therapist Directory

This is an extremely comprehensive directory of smoking cessation services, including the NHS, Allen Carr’s Easyway franchises, independent hypnotherapists and acupuncturists and of course every NSCI branch, organised geographically so you can easily locate the complete range of services in your area. It’s still very much in development at present, but in due course you will be able to search for a hypnotherapist in Hove or an acupuncturist in Antrim and find a range of therapists to select from, including their contact details and website if they have one, and alongside this will be the NHS offerings in your area as well.

The Advice Service

Who do you turn to when you need advice about a particular problem? There is the NHS, but if you’re not using their drug products they can’t usually help you. stopsmokinguk has a free service you can use to e-mail a specific question and get an answer from a smoking cessation expert.

Stop-Smoking Books

Reading a good book is always an excellent way to start tackling any problem. The problem with stop-smoking books is that there are so many, and who wants to read a boring book that doesn’t answer your questions? stopsmokinguk lists some of the better-known books and gives you a brief review of them to help you make up your mind before purchasing. There are direct links too for buying any book you choose.

Taking Control of Smoking

One of the worst bits of advice smokers often receive is that it’s not worth cutting down as a prelude to stopping. This short essay explains why it really is, and how to do it, because control is the key to stopping and, as we at the Institute are always saying, if you can’t control how many cigarettes you smoke, how are going to control whether you smoke?

Ten Top Stop-Smoking Tips

If you search for information on the Web about stopping smoking, there are any number of sites that purport to offer valuable tips. Unfortunately, they tend to be platitudes rather than real tips. stopsmokinguk gives you some really valuable tips, tips that are different from anything you have ever been given before.

Stop-Smoking Methods

One thing smokers always want to know is what methods are available and how they work, so they can make a decision about what to use. Because websites tend to be for specific therapies or products they are by definition unable to offer an insight into the full range of options in a way that helps you to make an informed choice. The NHS, for example, will give you a choice, but it’s a choice between different drug products, which is hardly a choice at all. If you speak to a hypnotherapist in Preston, for example, they will talk to you about hypnotherapy in Preston, but they will not be able to compare it with, say, acupuncture.

stopsmokinguk has really detailed information on every known therapy and product so you can at last understand what each one does before you spend money (or worse, take a drug that has serious side-effects). And of course if you are still not sure you can ask the Advice Service to analyse your case and come up with an answer for you.

The Little Yellow Book

This book is a small volume that pre-dates The NSCI Stop-Smoking Handbook, by Robert Brynin. Because it is now out of print, we have granted rights to stopsmokinguk to reproduce the entire content online. You will find this a very entertaining read, as well being highly informative and helpful.

 

Branch of the week

Our gratitude this week goes to our York acupuncturist, who got an excellent result with a very difficult case, a lady who had been turned down by another acupuncturist (and the NHS) as too difficult to help.

QUIT and the NHS national smokers’ helpline

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Are they providing real help to smokers?

I’ve just been talking on the phone with a puzzled smoker. She rang QUIT, which is a stop-smoking charity, having been recommended to do so by her GP. The reason she was puzzled was because the person she spoke to at QUIT didn’t give her what she was looking for. Truth to say, they wouldn’t give her what she was looking for. She rang us because she just couldn’t understand this.

She rang them, unsurprisingly since they advertise themselves as a national resource for helping smokers to stop, and said that since she had tried various nicotine replacement products without success, and had been prescribed a psychotropic drug by her GP with somewhat worrying results, she now wanted to see a hypnotherapist and wanted advice on how to find a qualified one. This, you would imagine, was a perfectly reasonable request.

Apparently not, though. The advisor tried hard to dissuade her from having hypnotherapy. She said ‘the only proven therapy’ is that provided by GPs, namely NRPs and Champix. Since this smoker had already tried these drug products with no success (and in the case of Champix with serious side effects) she not unreasonably protested that the reason for her call was to get help in finding a qualified Cambridge hypnotherapist who would not be giving her drugs.

The QUIT advisor was insistent though, He said that even though the drug products had not worked, she should keep trying them. She could not see the sense of this. It simply isn’t logical to keep trying something that doesn’t help. So she insisted that she wanted to try hypnotherapy and asked again for information on how to go about this in Cambridge, where she lives. The QUIT advisor finally said he was unable to help directly, but gave her details of two societies of complementary medicine.

The plot thickens. Thinking she was at last getting somewhere, the smoker contacted both organisations, and was shocked to be told, by both of them, that they were unable to recommend a hypnotherapist for her. This was when she contacted us. We can’t go into the details of these two organisations, but it turns out that both of them are used by QUIT to ensure that smokers DON’T get advice or information. Bizarre, but true. Neither organisation lists hypnotherapists (or acupuncturists, or indeed any other therapists in mainstream complementary medicine). In fact, neither of these organisations is remotely a register of complementary therapists at all.

So why does QUIT refer people to them?

The answer is that QUIT is funded by the pharmaceutical industry, and therefore its advice is compromised by its sponsors’ commercial imperatives. QUIT is not there to advise you on how to stop smoking, it is there to advise you on how to use its sponsors’ products. There would be nothing wrong with that, except for the organisation’s charitable status, and of course its claims to offer help that its’ sponsors do not allow it to give. In fact, unlike other charities, QUIT does not solicit funds from the public, as it doesn’t need to, because it receives enough from the drug companies. By the way, they don’t attempt to hide this fact. The QUIT Guide to Stopping Smoking actually carries the Nicorette logo on the cover!

We have a nice little test we do to catch them out. We call their helpline and ask for information on Allen Carr’s Easyway. Their answer is that they know nothing about it. Now, it would hardly be possible to be involved in smoking cessation and know nothing about the company. You yourself have almost certainly heard of it. It simply isn’t a credible answer. Of course, the reason why they make this foolish statement is simple. Their sponsors will not allow them to discuss competitive businesses.

QUIT can give useful advice, but only on the matter of its sponsors’ drug products, which means NRPs and psychotropic drugs. If you want to use those drugs, they are quite capable of advising you.

Now we come to the NHS’s smokers’ helpline, which you have probably seen advertised. Although this is advertised as an NHS service, it too is sponsored by the drug companies, so its staff can advise you on their sponsors’ products and nothing else.

And if you look at the professional literature and the information on the Web about stopping smoking, of which there is an enormous amount, you will see that universities and other professional-looking organisations are one hundred percent behind drugs for smoking cessation. Given the very significant evidence that therapies are highly effective, why do you think universities would completely ignore the matter of therapies altogether? Because their funding comes from pharmaceutical companies.

(If you are still not convinced that this is going on, let me introduce a matter that doesn’t concern smoking but is very instructive. You may know something of the battle being fought between the medical establishment and Dr Andrew Wakefield, who warned about the potential dangers of the MMR vaccine. The medical establishment have hounded Dr Wakefield out of the country. Why? Why did the British Medical Journal, which you would suppose to be a totally reputable and reliable authority on medical research, publish defamatory articles about Dr Wakefield? Well, the BMJ is funded by the pharmaceutical companies that make the MMR vaccine. It’s that simple. It is no longer possible to assume that the people we have always trusted with the health of the nation are indeed working for that at all, because they seem to be working for the pharmaceutical industry.)

So when the NHS tells you that the only proven smoking cessation technique is nicotine replacement products and psychotropic drugs, just remember who is paying them to say that.

By the way, further evidence of this tightening by the pharmaceutical companies of the smoking cessation market is that last year they managed to get the product licence revoked for Nicobrevin. This product was a harmless concoction of common ingredients that appeared to have some beneficial effect with stopping smoking but it posed a threat to the industry’s far more harmful and no more effective drug products.

Branch of the week

Plaudits this week go to Pauline, our Newcastle-upon-Tyne hypnotherapist. EC, a client she had seen a few weeks ago, called the QuitClub helpdesk to say she had started smoking again. We were able to work out what had happened, and passed this information on to Pauline, who was able to construct a follow-up session for the client which tackled this specific issues, and got her stopped again.

 

The NSCI Philosophy

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Why are we so different from the NHS and the other providers?

It’s a question we are asked quite regularly – what is the special philosophy of the National Smoking Cessation Institute? Why are we different from other providers of help to stop smoking? In short, one could say the real question is – why does the Institute even exist?

Well, the first answer is probably the same as why any medical service exists, other than the National Health Service. If the NHS could solve every medical problem for every person they would have no competition. Clearly, they can’t and, Nature abhoring a vacuum, the gap they leave is filled with all sorts of practitioners, from private GPs and consultants, through the more respectable professional complementary therapists like homeopaths, acupuncturists and osteopaths to those I won’t name but let’s say they are a bit more esoteric.

Private practitioners work in smoking cessation because there is obviously an enormous gap in NHS provision. We know that is true simply because so many smokers who want to stop and try with the NHS’s drug products don’t succeed. But we must also take into account a factor you may not have thought of. A much larger number is those smokers who don’t even try to stop, or have tried to stop and failed and now refuse to contemplate stopping again. What I am saying, and forgive me if you have heard me say this before, is that not only do so many people fail to stop smoking with the NHS’s drugs but, having failed, the NHS is creating a very large number of smokers who no longer believe they CAN stop. In other words, not only is the NHS stop-smoking service statistically ineffectual but it is often doing more harm than good.

So now let’s come to the fundamental difference between the NHS and the NSCI. The NHS is totally wedded to the concept of drug products for smoking cessation. This means nicotine replacement products and psychotropic drugs (such as Champix). The NSCI simply does not believe that giving smokers more of the drug they are addicted to is medically defensible, and neither do we believe that putting smokers on mood-altering drugs is acceptable. If either of these product ranges were effective in the short term, without any side effects, there would be some justification, but they are neither effective enough nor are they safe enough, and there you have the basic difference in the philosophy of the two organisations.

The point we reach here is that there is a clear need for stop-smoking therapy that doesn’t depend on drugs, and the NHS can’t provide those therapies. The two most successful therapies (apart from the more highly specialised ones like The Phoenix Programme) are acupuncture and hypnotherapy, and the fact that thousands of therapists are providing help for smokers, and smokers are flocking to them, is itself testament to the failure of NHS services. So, given that there are thousands of hypnotherapists and acupuncturists offering such help (just search ‘stop smoking hypnotherapist Walsall‘ or ‘stop smoking acupuncturist York‘ and see what a bewildering choice there is) where does the Institute come in?

Search, for example, ‘stop smoking hypnotherapist Eastbourne‘ and you will see a long list of Eastbourne hypnotherapists as well as the Institute’s Eastbourne hypnotherapy branch. Faced with this embarrassment of riches, what do you do? The real question is, why would you choose an NSCI hypnotherapist in Eastbourne over any other? To answer this question we now have to come back to the original question – what is different about the Institute’s philosophy?

Well, acupuncture and hypnotherapy need different answers to this question, so I will address hypnotherapy first. The great majority of hypnotherapists have smoking cessation as one of their specialities, and many of them have a lot of experience and are really very good at what they do. Apart from the original reason we got involved in hypnotherapy (smokers kept calling us and asking if we could recommend someone, and this led to us collecting a list of hypnotherapists we had spoken with and could recommend, and this in turn made us realise we needed to go further), there is now a big difference in our approach. All the research shows that most smokers who have hypnotherapy do stop, but the research also shows that many of those face problems at some stage and start smoking again. So we realised that helping people to stop smoking was only addressing one part of the problem.

This is why we have NSCI QuitClub, our free lifetime support service. This is available for every single smoker going through any of our programmes, and I cannot overstate its importance. I will confess that many smokers don’t understand it. They fall for the myth that if you start smoking again nothing can be done to help you, and much of the developmental work we do is to find better ways of saying to smokers that this just is not true, that if you do start again we CAN help you.

Now let’s talk about acupuncture. The majority of acupuncturists don’t in fact specialise in smoking cessation, which means that if you search for ‘stop smoking acupuncturist Sutton Coldfield‘ you will see countless acupuncturists but you could waste a lot of time phoning them to ask if they can help you stop smoking, because so many of them can’t. At the NSCI we realised early on that acupuncture was an underrated therapy for stopping smoking, and an important part of our development work is currently to make contact with those acupuncturists who do want to help smokers, and to help them to develop their specialism with smokers. If you read our news items we post regularly about new NSCI branches, you will see that a disproportionate number of them are acupuncture branches. This is quite deliberate, as we work hard to make sure that smokers throughout the country can get access to an acupuncturist to help them, one who works closely within our programme, which combines acupuncture with QuitClub, to cover both the physiological and the psychological issues in smoking cessation.

Branch of the week

Samantha had decided to wait until New Year to arrange to see one of our Leeds hypnotherapists, not realising that stop-smoking hypnotherapists can be extra busy at that time of the year. She had to wait a week or so, but thanks to our Roundhay hypnotherapist for working late one evening to help her.

 

Some comments on our website

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It’s how it is for good reasons.

You probably found our website, as most smokers do, because you did a search for a stop-smoking hypnotherapist in Stevenage or Sandwich or wherever you live and there were lots of hypnotherapists listed but you were attracted to the idea of a national institute that does nothing but help people to stop smoking.

Having landed perhaps on the home page or the hypnotherapy in Stevenage branch page, the first thing you may have noticed is that this isn’t a site about hypnotherapy to stop smoking, it’s a site about whichever therapy you need to stop smoking and you’ve never seen such a thing and you are perhaps a little surprised because now you have to think about acupuncture too, or even The Phoenix Programme. Perhaps it never occurred to you that there would be a choice.

So why is this? Well, because the NSCI is first and foremost a research institute, and what we research is how to help people to stop smoking, and what we are going to ‘research’, for want of a better word, in your specific case, is how to help YOU to stop smoking. Our primary concern is to recommend the best therapy for you as an individual so we present you here with the correct choices (although we don’t have as many acupuncture branches yet as we would like, but we’re getting there).

Once you are sure which therapy you need the next stage is to check that we have a branch providing that therapy in your area. The branch page states very clearly whether it is a hypnotherapy or an acupuncture branch or both. In some locations the branches will be in the same location, but not always. For example our London N1 acupuncture branch is in the same building as the hypnotherapy branch, whereas in Leeds, for example, we have hypnotherapy branches in Middleton and Roundhay but the acupuncture branch is in Morley. So look at the page carefully, because we do sometimes get smokers enquiring about a therapy where we can’t yet provide it because they haven’t looked at the page properly. But even if we can’t provide the therapy you need right where you are, you shouldn’t have to go too far.

The next thing you will notice about the branch page is that we lay out very clearly exactly what you get when you join an NSCI stop-smoking programme. In almost every hypnotherapy branch, the programme includes a follow-up session if we feel you need one, without extra charge. In our acupuncture branches you will notice the number of appointments required is a little variable. This is because our acupuncturists are not asked to conform to a set programme of treatments – they all have a lot of experience in this work and they know how many treatments they want to recommend based on that experience. Of course, if you do have a residual problem after the course of treatment there is nothing to stop you returning for a top-up treatment (at a reduced cost).

And with every programme, whether it’s hypnotherapy or acupuncture (or The Phoenix Programme), lifetime membership of NSCI QuitClub is always included. Click on the link on the branch page to read about this excellent support service.

And that brings me to our fees. You will see that in every single case, on every branch page throughout the site, we state clearly what the fee is. This might seem obvious to you, but I look at a lot of hypnotherapists’ websites and I am shocked how many are coy about their charges. I personally would be unhappy even making a telephone enquiry about any service without knowing first what the cost is. If I can’t afford it, this is going to put me in an embarrassing situation, so I am likely not to make the call in the first place. I struggle to understand why therapists don’t state their fees on their website. Are they hoping they are so good at selling their service that the smoker won’t care what the cost is? If that is true, I wonder how many people are simply not calling them for the same reason I wouldn’t. If they have gone to so much trouble to create a website with such a lot of information, why not include the one bit of information you can guarantee every smoker is going to want? I’m tempted to think that if they charge a reasonable fee they would say so, and the fact that they don’t include the information means they are pretty costly.

Anyway, that’s them and this is us. As a not-for-profit public service, it obviously behoves us to be completely clear about what we do, how much we charge and exactly what you are going to get for your money. If you feel there is anything missing for our website, either on the information pages or the branch pages, do contact us because we want to know.

Branch of the week

Our special thanks this week go to Lynda, our Hull hypnotherapist, who did a home visit for a client in Hull who was housebound.

More new branches added to the NSCI network

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New acupuncturists and hypnotherapists in London, Cambridge, Norwich, Manchester and Chichester

This is a regular feature to update readers with details of new branches, as well as changes to existing branches. As new branches come on stream, or existing ones are changed, our website is updated immediately, so you will always find the relevant, up-to-date information on the branch pages.

Acupuncture in Islington and Stoke Newington

We already have a hypnotherapy branch in Islington, and now we have been able to open an acupuncture branch in the same premises, The Moving Arts Centre in Liverpool Road. Adele, our new Islington acupuncturist, also practises in Stoke Newington, so we now have an acupuncture branch there as well. The first patient Adele saw on joining the Institute was a smoker who was about to fly to New Zealand and simply couldn’t face such a long flight without cigarettes. Adele was able to use auricular acupuncture (ear studs) to help her through the flight without withdrawal symptoms.

Hypnotherapy in Cambridge

We now have a branch in Cambridge, run by Carrie, who was originally our Shoreham hypnotherapist but moved to Ely, where she ran a branch until moving her work into Cambridge. The new branch is in Oxford Road. Carrie has been a hypnotherapist for ten years now, and a member of the Institute since 2006.

Acupuncture in Norwich

We are growing our network of acupuncture branches rapidly now, as more and more smokers are coming to realise just how effective this therapy is. We now have a branch in the centre of Norwich, in Bethel Street, with an extremely experienced acupuncturist. If you haven’t considered acupuncture before, do ring us and we will explain how it works, and check whether it is likely to be the best therapy for you to stop smoking.

Hypnotherapy in Manchester

We’re not at all sure why this is, but we have had some difficulty finding the right hypnotherapists in Manchester for our branches. For such a major city this is surprising. However, one of our latest branches is Sale, which is easily accessible from the whole of south Manchester and north Cheshire. Sally, our Sale hypnotherapist, like perhaps most of our members, turned to hypnotherapy after a successful first career, and so she brings a lot of life experience to helping smokers to stop.

Our Chichester hypnotherapy branch has moved

For a short while recently we were without a Chichester hypnotherapist but that has now been resolved and we are up and running again in West Street, in the centre of the city.

The London SW2 hypnotherapy branch has moved

This branch has moved to SW1, so we now have a hypnotherapist in Victoria, London SW1.

We have a Blackpool hypnotherapist again

Having been without a Blackpool branch for a while, we welcome Carl to our membership. His branch is located in Lytham Road.

 

Money-back guarantees

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Why doesn’t the NSCI offer one with its stop-smoking programmes?

One of the questions that comes up from time to time when we talk to smokers is whether our stop-smoking programmes come with a money-back guarantee. Smokers will typically call and say that they have come across a hypnotherapist in Maidenhead or Maidstone or Manchester or wherever, offering one, and Allen Carr’s Easyway franchises offer one, so if the National Smoking Cessation Institute is the leading organisation for smoking cessation programmes why don’t we do that?

Because it’s wrong. It sounds good, but it isn’t, it’s bad. Let me explain why.

If you are a smoker you probably recognise that you are afraid of stopping. There are two fears we talking about in the Institute, the fear of failure and the fear of success. Most smokers have both of these fears, and either one of them can cause you to fail to stop smoking.

The fear of failure is the same fear that prevents you trying to do anything that you might struggle with, because we’re all afraid of being shown up – even to ourselves. Smokers have this fear in large quantities, especially because most smokers have made more than one attempt to stop and have failed (actually they might not have failed, they might have succeeded and then started smoking again, which is quite different), and so they become afraid to try again, because they don’t want to ‘fail’ again.

The fear of success is rather more complicated, and actually it’s also more of a problem. It means that you can’t imagine never smoking again. Why can’t you imagine it? Well, probably because you’ve never been an adult who doesn’t smoke, so you have no memory of it to make you think hang on, that was really OK, I’m looking forward to getting there again.

Anyway, the result of these two fears combined is that almost every smoker is afraid to stop. The effect of this fear is that it prevents them thinking about stopping, and even if they do think about it they put it off, and even if they don’t put it off when they do try to stop they sabotage themselves. You may have been there yourself. You’re trying to not smoke but some silly thing happens, a minor stress is enough, and you use it as an excuse to smoke.

Now back to the question of guarantees. A guarantee says, I’m going to try and get you to stop smoking, but if it doesn’t work, well you don’t have to worry, because I’m going to give you your money back. So there you are, going to a therapist to stop smoking and he says you don’t actually have to bother too much about this because your money is safe. You have the therapy, whatever it is, and in the back of your mind is the thought that whatever happens you can get your money back if it doesn’t work. And remember, you are afraid, and that fear means YOU DON’T WANT IT TO WORK!

So what happens? Well, you might do really well and failure doesn’t arise, but to be honest almost every smoker going through any stop-smoking programme (yes, even the Institute’s) is going to be faced, at some point, with problems. Stopping smoking, and you may have heard me say this before because I say it a lot because it’s true, is a process, not an event. And that process almost inevitably involves challenges. You only have to do well for 99% of the time to have a problem 1% of the time. It might be nothing more than being out with friends having a drink and you’re doing really well and they are being supportive and no-one is encouraging you to smoke but nonetheless you have, don’t forget, in the back of your mind, the fear of stopping, and all that fear needs to do is to get you to try one. So you do. Hey, it’s not as great as you thought it was going to be but if you’re like most people at this point you will try another one. And by the end of the evening you have convinced yourself you have failed.

You didn’t mean to fail. You had every intention of succeeding. But the fear of success forced you to smoke and then it forced you to convince yourself that smoking one cigarette, or two, or three, or even a whole pack, is failure, because it wants you to fail.

Now, at this critical life-and-death stage one of two things is going to apply. The therapist you went to said don’t worry, whatever happens, and that includes smoking, we are committed to helping you, so just call and we will work out what to do next. If they said that, they are probably going to be what comes between you and an untimely death.

Or they said don’t worry, if you fail you can have your money back, and you thought wow, that’s great, what a really genuine person this is, backing his therapy with a money-back guarantee. And so you call him up and say I’ve failed and I want my money back.

Now which of these two scenarios do you think is more helpful to the smoker who is serious about stopping?

Money-back guarantees encourage failure. They are wrong. At the Institute none of our programmes offers such a guarantee. Search on the web for, say, a hypnotherapist in Leeds, Liverpool, Lee or Lewes and you will find our website, and on it you will find a great deal of information about how we are going to help you to stop smoking (and how we are going to help you to stay stopped in our QuitClub support service) but you will find no mention of ever giving you your money back because we won’t, we will instead keep working with you until you succeed. Which would you rather have? It’s why we have the rather catchy slogan – ‘We won’t give up until you do’.

Branch of the week

Our hero this week is our Glasgow hypnotherapist, Johan, who succeeded with a really difficult client who was smoking a lot of cannabis, and had a range of psychological issues that needed to be treated with special sensitivity.

How Successful are the Institute’s Therapies?

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It’s an obvious question, with no easy answer

I have just been talking with another smoker, in this case looking for a Maidstone hypnotherapist to help her to stop smoking, and she asked the question that so many callers ask when they ring us for help. What is the success rate for hypnotherapy? What is the success rate for acupuncture? We get asked both questions regularly.

On the surface, it’s a completely reasonable question. If you’re going to invest your money in private therapy, you want to know it is going to work. If you were buying a product, you would want to know how reliable it is, so why should it be different for a service?

Well, services, by their very nature, are simply not as quantifiable as products. A manufacturer can guarantee that their product will work according to the specifications, and if it doesn’t they will exchange it or refund your money. We have come to expect this commitment, and quite rightly. But how do you measure the success of a service?

Well, sometimes that’s not so difficult. If you have a repair done on your car, it’s easy enough to know whether the repair has worked. If you have your house repainted, you can quite easily measure how good a job the decorator has made of it.

But now let’s look at perhaps the opposite extreme. You go to your GP with stomach problems. Do you expect him to diagnose and resolve the problem there and then, or would you accept that it may take some investigation and resolving, that it might be a process of trial and error? Alright, now let’s say you go and ask your GP for help with stopping smoking. Let’s say he gives you a prescription for nicotine patches. You go off and try them but they don’t work. So you go back and tell him this and he sits there and thinks about it and says OK let’s try nicotine lozenges. These don’t work either, and over a period of time he tries you on four different nicotine replacement products until he gets desperate and puts you on the drug of last resort, Champix.

I think you might have patience with your doctor, because he’s trying to help you. Oh, and of course the other reason you’re not too worried about this is because the National Health Service is paying for it, you’re not. The point, so far, is that you probably accept that stopping smoking is a process of trial and error that is probably going to take some time and is also probably going to include some failures, but that doesn’t bother you too much because it’s free.

In the end, though, you realise that you need private help, because the NHS is limited to drug products and they haven’t worked. So now you’re paying, and suddenly trial and error is not acceptable. Now, you expect it to work first time.

OK, perhaps you have a point. Private should, by definition, be better than NHS. On the other hand, the NHS drugs have let you down so badly that they have created the belief that you can’t stop smoking. If they have done this they have done more harm than good, and now you want your Maidstone hypnotherapist (or wherever) to wave a magic wand and sort it all out. Well, as it happens this is precisely what happens more often than not. Time and time again we take on a smoker who has failed repeatedly with the NHS’s drugs, books in for our hypnotherapy programme, and simply stops smoking. Only then do they wonder why on Earth they wasted so much time before on things that had no chance of helping them. Well, that’s sad but you can’t turn the clock back.

So we can reasonably say that both hypnotherapy and acupuncture have an excellent record of success, even when smokers come to them damaged psychologically by their GP’s failures. But if this isn’t enough, if you want us to put a figure on it and say exactly what the rate of success is for these therapies, well, I’m afraid we’re going to have to disappoint you, and let me explain why.

Why do we refuse to make claims for our therapies? After all, we’re supposed to be the best in our field, so surely we should? And after all again, many therapists, especially hypnotherapists, do exactly that – they advertise a stop-smoking programme in Maidstone, or Manchester, or Milton Keynes or wherever, and they say 90% success! And you think well that’s amazing, I’ll do it. Well, let me give you one piece of advice here. If a hypnotherapist ever says such a thing to you, do one thing. Ask them to prove it. And if you do that and they say there are statistics produced by this or that university that hypnotherapy is 90% successful, laugh in their face and tell them Robert Brynin told you to do that.

You’re not interested in some figure someone somewhere has published, you are interested in how good your chosen therapist is. And trust me on this, they can’t prove it. Ever.

And neither can an NSCI branch hypnotherapist, for exactly the same reason – it is unprovable. And for this reason, as a research institute, we cannot make claims, and that applies to every NSCI member therapist.

Alright, so far so good, but have I helped you? Probably not. So let me finish this with what I hope is a rather more helpful bit of advice.

There are three things you can do to give yourself the best possible chance of stopping smoking – and staying stopped:

1. Use the right therapy. You might be surprised how many people try a therapy for no better reason than ‘it worked’ for a friend. All that proves is that is a viable therapy, but of course it is – they all are. Infinitely more important is whether it is the right therapy for you. Most smokers have no idea that this matters.

2. Use the right therapist. How do you know if the therapist you see advertised is properly qualified? That they specialise in smoking cessation? When you speak to them they will claim these things, but how do you KNOW?

3. Most smokers having hypnotherapy do stop – at least for a while, but it is a sad fact that things can, and do, go wrong. You can almost assume something will go wrong, because that is the nature of coming off a drug you have been dependent on for many years. Support – and I mean long-term support – is essential to pick you up when you fall over.

When we set up the NSCI hypnotherapy and acupuncture programmes, we knew from the beginning that there would be a point to it only if we fulfilled these three requirements.

1. Smokers who call us are questioned about their problems with stopping smoking before we recommend a particular therapy.

2. Every hypnotherapist or acupuncturist who applies to join the Institute must satisfy us that they are properly qualified and have specialist experience. They must then show a continuing professionalism in all the work they do with us.

3. Every smoker joining any of our programmes is enrolled in NSCI QuitClub, our free lifetime support service.

So, the short answer to the question – how successful are the Institute’s stop-smoking therapies – is that whilst we are not allowed to make an unverifiable claim we can say that if you are looking for say, a Berkhamsted hypnotherapist, a Birmingham hypnotherapist, a Brackley hypnotherapist or a Blackpool hypnotherapist, or indeed a hypnotherapist anywhere in the UK, as you can see there is going to be an NSCI hypnotherapy branch where you are that satisfies all these requirements.

 

Branch of the week

Our hero this week is our Stevenage hypnotherapist, Veronica, who saw an urgent client (he was waiting for an operation and it came up unexpectedly) over the holiday period even though she wasn’t supposed to be working.

 

The NSCI Network of Branches Continues to Grow

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New acupuncturists and hypnotherapists in Walsall, Sutton Coldfield, Croydon, Hertford and Leeds 

The National Smoking Cessation Institute is growing, as part of our strategy to make first-class therapy available to as many smokers as possible throughout the UK.

We are particularly pleased in this issue of our news bulletin to announce three new acupuncture branches, and it is gratifying that acupuncturists are coming to us because they want to specialise in helping people to stop smoking and recognise that membership of the Institute, with its specialised research and its QuitClub support programme, is the most effective way to do that.

Acupuncture in Walsall and Sutton Coldfield

Our recently-joined Walsall acupuncturist, Paul, is one of our most experienced member therapists, with thirty years in practice. He runs two branches for us, one for acupuncture in Walsall and the other for acupuncture in Sutton Coldfield.

Acupuncture for stopping smoking often requires three or more treatments to be fully effective, but such is Paul’s expertise that he is able to complete the process in just two sessions, which are combined with neuro-linguistic programming.

The Walsall branch is in Bate Street, just off Littleton Street West, and in Sutton Coldfield we are in Kings Road, near the junction with Chester Road North.

Acupuncture in Croydon

Our network of acupuncture branches is growing particularly rapidly, as part of our drive to show that this is a therapy that has been sadly underrated by many smokers who perhaps are simply unaware of just how effective it is. We now have a Croydon acupuncturist, Stephen, who provides the treatment regime favoured for stopping smoking, which is a combination of classical and auricular (ear) acupuncture.

Our new Croydon acupuncture branch is in Lower Addiscombe Road, conveniently located close by Addiscombe Station.

Hypnotherapy in Hertford

Our Hertford hypnotherapist, Giancarlo, runs this branch and also the one in Ware. Like very many hypnotherapists, he came to this work later in life, having had a successful first career and deciding to do something that is of social importance. He has a personal reason for helping people stop smoking too, as his own father died from lung cancer.

The Hertford branch is in North Road, and in Ware we are on Widford Road, between Widford and Hunsdon.

Hypnotherapy in Leeds

Major cities like Leeds require more than one NSCI branch to ensure that all smokers can get to one as easily as possible, so we now have a branch in Middleton as well as our existing branch in Roundhay. Middleton is convenient for smokers in Rothwell and Morley, but also if you are coming from Dewsbury or Wakefield, although we do also have a Wakefield hypnotherapist, who is based in Normanton.

Our new Leeds hypnotherapist is Nigel, who is also a member of the British Society of Clinical Hypnosis, which has many of the country’s best hypnotherapists on its roll.

The Leeds Middleton branch is situated in Town Street, near the junction with Manor Farm Way.