Chewing Through a Smoking Habit

ESSAY By JOHN G. SPANGLER, M.D.
Jan. 31, 2009

Okay.

It was your New Year's resolution.

You were going to quit smoking but did not stick to it very long.

Not only that, you've tried many times in the past and haven't quit.

In fact, you've tried the nicotine gum, the nicotine patch, Zyban, Chantix, maybe even hypnosis or acupuncture -- some of which helped a little, maybe, some of which did not help at all.

You were constantly nagged by the need for a "nicotine fix," the craving that hampers smokers' ability to stop smoking.

Dang it! I need a cigarette!"You finally relented.

You're not alone. You are what I call, in my smoking cessation clinic, the "I've-tried-everything" patient.

The good news is you have lots of company.

The even better news?

Stopping smoking is something you can do, and many, many smokers just like you have done it.

Maybe you just need a novel way to do it, something to help start the ball rolling, something to ease you into becoming 100 percent smoke-free.

A new study published in the February issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine by Dr. Saul Shiffman and colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh might just be what it takes this time.

Shiffman and his co-workers noticed that many smokers want to quit smoking, but stopping abruptly -- even if they use stop-smoking medications -- is just too hard for them.

So they designed a study in which smokers gradually began using the nicotine gum and gradually cut down on the number of cigarettes they smoked over the course of eight weeks.

The study was "controlled," meaning that that the subjects were randomly assigned either "real" nicotine gum or "placebo" ("dummy") gum designed to look and taste the same as the real thing.

Neither the participants nor the researchers knew who was taking what until the end of the study. This made it a much stronger study design because it factored out the "placebo effect" -- the thought that, "I am taking something, so it must be helping me."