Quote:
Originally posted by sycamore
And that's great that you did it that way. But that's YOU. It doesn't necessarily work like that for everyone else.
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Obviously not--there are all kinds of outcomes from an effort to quit smoking, and they're not all successful.
I'm skeptical of approaches that don't involve stopping cold turkey, or that attempt to substitute one drug for another. Some people do end up quitting while using patches or other drugs. I don't think there's any way to know if that really made it easier for them. That's probably one reson insurance companies don't want to pay for that kind of therapy. If there was a drug for nicotine like Antabuse for alcohol, you might see more willingness to cover that. Maybe. If they were convinced it would save them money.
A while after you stop dosing yourself the cravings do lessen, but there's a boatload of detoxfication to work your way though before you get there, and the longer you've been dosing yourself, the longer that's going to take. Cold turkey has to be the shortest path to reducing physiological dependancy...as long as you actually do *stop*, and *stay* stopped long enough that the idea of not falling back into the addiction has a higher value for you than the nicotine buzz does.
Beyond that, there are the behavioral issues: habituation rather than addiction. They can be a lot harder to tackle. Believing that your addiction is somehow different and less tractable than other people's can't be helpful on that score. "Ads don't work on me." strikes me as a curious thing to say. An ad isn't going to make you stop smoking...at best, all an ad can do is try to keep the ideas and issues in front of your concious mind, and work towards tipping the balance.
Reducing the spaces where smoking is permitted isn't to discourage smokers, it's for the benefit of the people who don't want to breathe your sidestream. There are no "no nicotine patches" zones.