** Update 16/07.10: There is a link in the third comment at the end of this article to the website of Action on Smoking and Health (A.S.H.) which refers to a study on cravings that confirms exactly what I’m talking about here. God knows I never expected ASH to confirm or agree with anything I say, because they have staunchly defended and promoted Nicotine Replacement products until now, but maybe everyone involved in that is getting ready to admit that NRT is a complete waste of money because it’s based on a myth, just as I’ve been saying all along. Now watch them immediately start promoting some other pharmaceutical instead, instead of admitting openly how WRONG they were all this time about hypnotherapy, the Allen Carr approach, acupuncture… no, it’s chemicals, chemicals chemicals all the way!

Anyway enjoy the article!

Cravings Are Not Withdrawal Symptoms

Whether you are a smoker or not, you know what a craving is because we all get lots of cravings, they are not all about tobacco. In hypnotherapy we shut down cravings for all sorts of things routinely: smoking is just one example of that. If anyone reading this doesn’t believe that it is simply because they haven’t experienced it themselves, but it’s an everyday occurence for hypnotherapists - I’ve been doing this for the last ten years. Easily demonstrated too.

For several decades now, smokers have had it drilled into them that smoking is “nicotine addiction, nicotine addiction, nicotine addiction”. Yet for most of the time people have been smoking tobacco in Europe it has simply been regarded as a filthy habit. Odd references to “addiction” have occured down the ages but that is partly due to the unclear meaning of the term, which has often been confused with Compulsive Habit anyway. But I can easily explain why smokers’ cravings cannot possibly be withdrawal symptoms and are not related to nicotine levels in the blood anyway.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I know from my own experience as a smoker in the past that trying to quit smoking with willpower alone - or with nicotine replacement products, Zyban or Champix - CAN be a real struggle, or even seem impossible. According to the U.K. Government’s own commissioned studies into the long-term outcomes of those methods (which the National Health Service recommend) the chances are very much that your success - if any - will be temporary. What smokers don’t realise is, that is NOT because it is really hard to stop smoking, it is because those methods are all based on a myth: “addiction” to nicotine.

If cravings were withdrawal symptoms you would experience them at their worst when the nicotine level was lowest, which would be first thing in the morning if you are a typical smoker. No nicotine has been taken into the body for hours, so those “nicotine receptors” should be “going crazy” the moment you’re awake. Yet most smokers do not even keep tobacco by the bed. So there is a gap - an elapse of time - between the moment they open their eyes, and the moment when they first light up a cigarette.

Of course, there are a few smokers who light up before they get out of bed but I think everyone is aware that this is not the norm. The majority of habitual smokers will normally get up, go to the bathroom, maybe have a shower, go downstairs, put the kettle on, feed the cat… all the time feeling perfectly normal. They are not climbing the walls desperate for nicotine. But why not? They haven’t had any nicotine for hours! IF THE URGE TO SMOKE WAS REALLY A WITHDRAWAL SYMPTOM, THAT WOULD BE THEIR WORST MOMENT.

Also, many smokers feel an urge to pick up a cigarette when they have just put one out, such as when drinking, socialising or if bored. That urge is compelling, but it cannot be withdrawal because the nicotine level in the blood is still high from the previous cigarette. A “withdrawal symptom” is an experience caused by nicotine withdrawing from the system, which only happens later. Another clear indicator is the fact that the urge to smoke will vanish in particular circumstances regardless of falling nicotine levels: many smokers never smoke outside or in the street, so if they go out shopping they don’t want one. Gardening, playing sports… hours may go by, nicotine levels fall away - no symptoms, no “withdrawal”. This is because cravings are not linked to nicotine levels at all. They are compulsive urges prompting the usual habitual behaviour, but ONLY if it is a) possible, b) appropriate and c) convenient.

So if you get on a plane - as long as you’re okay with flying and don’t seriously object to the smoking restriction - you will find that nicotine levels can fall and keep on falling, and hey presto! No pesky withdrawal symptoms! Likewise if you board a bus, ride on a train, walk into Sainsburys or a cathedral, step into an operating theatre or meet the Queen… the brain knows this is NOT A SMOKING OPPORTUNITY so it doesn’t send the signals until you LEAVE that situation and a smoking opportunity presents itself.

Now, I need hardly point out that the social restrictions I’ve just described require INTELLIGENCE, SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE AND DISCERNMENT to distinguish between, and I doubt if any scientist is going to suggest that the nicotine receptors in the brain possess such complex abilities such as would be required to appreciate the shifting rules and mores of modern society. No, they were simply supposed to “go crazy” due to the falling level of nicotine specifically - NOT the fact that you’re chatting to the Queen, halfway to Cyprus or admiring a beautiful stained-glass window.

Real drug addictions are totally different. If a heroin addict gets on a plane and the level of heroin in the blood falls low THEN THEY ARE ILL, it doesn’t matter where they are or what they are doing. They couldn’t make out like they were fine even if they were talking to HRH.

Interested? Want to know more about what’s really going on with cravings? Click on the Read The Book section of the site, and when the Contents page appears, read a bit more. If you want to read all of it, click on Buy The Book. £16.95 for the paperback, or just £5 for the full download version. If you don’t like buying on-line, contact me directly for the other options.

I shut down smoking habits in a single session routinely. You can’t do that with a heroin addiction. I’ve tried. If you smoke tobacco you are NOT a drug addict, and that’s why the nicotine-based approaches rarely work except in the short-term. And that’s down to willpower mainly. The real solution is hypnotherapy, and there will come a time when that is simply common knowledge and everyone will understand that all this endless hype about “nicotine addiction” was just a simple mistake which turned into a gigantic moneyspinner for the drug companies at the taxpayers’ expense.

Filed under: Drugs on Trial, Hypnotherapy, Nicotine, Smoking, The Book, The Campaign by Chris
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Just heard Simon Singh on Radio 4’s Today programme talking about homeopathy again, rubbishing three randomised controlled trials that seem to indicate benefits despite the fact that he “only looked at them very quickly last night”. Very rigorous, that, Simon! Anyway, thanks for dismissing them for us so we don’t have to bother looking at them at all.

He also claimed: “Look, I would change my mind in an instant if there were any credible evidence…” Shouldn’t that be: “Look, I will rubbish any evidence you put forward in an instant…” or at least, after only looking at it very quickly. What more is required anyway when you already know you’re right?

Then he suggested that continuing to fund homeopathy was “dangerous”, citing a single case of a woman in Australia who had cancer and chose homeopathic treatment but died, allegedly entirely because of that. Simon, that is simply scaremongering. First of all, you have no idea what her take on that was. Pharmaceuticals kill people in their thousands - not going down that route is a matter of principle for some. People even have the right to refuse treatment of any kind. You are assuming that her decision would surely have been different if she had known the outcome. Would you assume that in all the fatal cases that took the conventional cancer treatment route? Don’t most of those people assume: “Oh well, I guess the doctors did all they could, but my number was up”? They might be a bit miffed if someone started using their personal fate as a way of calling modern cancer treatments into question, but you don’t hesitate to do that in the case of homeopathy.

Finally he said: “Would we allow pharmaceutical treatments to be used if there was no evidence to support it?” Well now, let’s see: Prozac and Seroxat only got approval in the clinical trials because the drug company witheld the trial data that showed that they didn’t work any better than the placebo. Nicotine Replacement Poisoning only has a 6% success rate at one year, exactly the same as willpower according to the Iowa study and the Borland report, to name but two of many reports coming to the same conclusion (see Evidence section on this site).

Both still being prescribed today… so yes, Simon. Evidently we do. This is exactly why you and old Eddie Ernst have ZERO credibility, because neither of you EVER admit that. Bugger all to do with science, it’s all about money and ideology, and you’re either not quite clever enough to realise that, or not honest enough to admit it. Now, I know bog-all about homeopathy and I’m not interested in it either, but I just love the way these self-appointed “quackbusters” pretend pharmaceutical products are genuinely “evidence-based” with regard to efficacy and safety. It’s not homeopathy that’s killing and hospitalising thousands of people every year, Simon. It’s pharmaceutical products. See Daily Mail Article here on this site for more about that. People need to know this stuff for their own safety.

Filed under: Drugs on Trial, Nicotine by Chris
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An excerpt from Nicotine: The Drug That Never Was (Volume II: A Change Of Mind)

ii). The tobacco story has so many curious twists and turns that I am never really surprised when another one pops up. In Volume One I mentioned that I hadn’t quite managed to discover exactly when the “nicotine addiction” story started, as an interpretation of compulsive use and I suggested that if anyone was intrigued about that then they should keep digging and if they found anything enlightening to let me know. This inspired Chepstow-based hypnotherapist Marc Bishop to investigate further and he contacted me recently to tell me about Lennox Johnston, of whom I had never heard.

The fact that I had never heard of him is interesting in itself, because it turns out that Lennox Johnston – and be honest, you’ve never heard of him either, right? - was the first person to use nicotine in isolation to offset the impulse to reach for tobacco. In other words he invented Nicotine Replacement Therapy (NRT) – the very thing my book denounces. Now, NRT is prescribed and sold all over the world, so if we all know about innovators like Alexander Fleming and Louis Pasteur, how come Lennox Johnston is never mentioned when people talk about NRT?

Actually it is probably because he was a bit like me: he made a bit of a nuisance of himself and everybody thought at first that he was wrong… which causes me to feel a certain, odd kinship with the chappie even though he is very much my adversary in this argument, for am I not in a very similar position here, trying to explain why smoking is not what most people presently think it is? Here is an extract from Johnston’s typical pronouncements to the editor of The Lancet circa 1953:

“I think it more sensible and scientifically satisfying to recognise tobacco-smoking as a drug addiction from start to finish. It varies in degree from slight to serious. The euphemism “habit” should be discarded completely… no smoker derives positive pleasure and benefit from tobacco. The bliss of headache or toothache relieved is analogous to that of craving for tobacco appeased.”

It is immediately clear that Allen Carr’s later observations in The Easy Way To Stop Smoking have their origins here in Lennox Johnston’s view, although I doubt Carr had ever heard of him either. He certainly never mentioned him in any of his own writings to my knowledge.

So what did the medical profession think of Johnston’s insistence that tobacco smoking was a drug addiction in the 1950’s? Well, we have managed to find this frank repudiation by none other than the Honorary Secretary of the Society for the Study of Addiction, one H. Pullar-Strecker, in response to Johnston’s assertions:

“Much as one may ‘crave’ for one’s smoke, tobacco is no drug of addiction. Proper addicts… will stop at nothing to obtain the drug that their system demands imperatively.”

Smokers often tell me that they are puzzled by the fact that although they wouldn’t normally go for nine hours without a cigarette during the day, when they are on a plane it doesn’t seem to bother them until they land, or very shortly before they land. The only exceptions seem to be smokers who resent the restriction, or have a problem with flying anyway. Likewise we hear of smokers seemingly untroubled by cravings during a spell in hospital, or more ordinarily whenever they go anywhere where smoking is commonly accepted as being out of the question, such as Mothercare or the Finsbury Park Mosque. It seems that as long as the smoker accepts that restriction, there will be no urge to smoke until they leave that situation. That is certainly not withdrawal, and falling nicotine levels in the body during the nine-hour flight (for example) are clearly irrelevant. The “nicotine receptors” in the brain are hardly in a position to appreciate the smoking ban on aircraft – or observe it – so this certainly begs the question “Why are they not ‘going crazy’ - as the NRT advert would have us believe is the cause of smokers’ cravings – in all of the situations mentioned above?” For of course Pullar-Strecker was right: the heroin addict cannot do that. If a heroin addict gets on a plane and the heroin level in the blood falls low then they are ill, it doesn’t matter what they are doing or where they are situated. That’s withdrawal.

Lennox Johnston was a Glaswegian GP who had been a smoker himself and according to his obituary in the British Medical Journal (Volume 292, dated 29/03/86) he quit smoking twice. It relates how he pondered his compulsion to continue smoking and “wondered what would be the effect of stopping” – only to find that it proved easier than he expected. A year or so later, he started smoking again and after that it took him “two agonising years” to give up.

Later he became an anti-smoking campaigner and began to experiment with pure solutions of nicotine which he often administered to himself, once with near-fatal consequences. He also wrote to The Lancet describing an experiment he devised himself which involved about thirty smokers who apparently allowed him to inject them with nicotine whenever they felt the urge to reach for tobacco, which Johnston claimed then subsided. Although this certainly does not qualify as a bona fide clinical trial, it can be regarded as the first ever attempt to trial nicotine replacement as a concept. The Lancet published Johnston’s letter, and so began the biggest medical mistake of the 20th Century – though of course, everyone thought he was wrong at the time.

Well – not quite everyone. Throughout the history of tobacco-smoking in Europe there have been occasional voices calling it an “addiction”, though quite what those individuals thought that term really meant is not easy to determine now. Yet for most of that history nearly everybody simply regarded it as a filthy habit – which is pretty accurate. A complex compulsive habit to be exact – for a full definition of that see Chapter Ten in Volume One, where I spell out the key differences between that and true drug addiction.

It is only very recently, in fact, that the “nicotine addiction” interpretation has become the general impression, and not everyone believes it even now. There have always been voices in the scientific community who have pointed out the inconsistencies, but they couldn’t explain the compulsive element because they didn’t have the key knowledge of the normal operations of the human Subconscious mind and how it organises and activates compulsive habitual behaviour. So they got shouted down – as did the tobacco companies who tried to point out that other habitual behaviours that did not involve any substances – such as shopaholics and compulsive gamblers – seemed to be of a similar order, but eventually they too accepted the new doctrine and dropped the argument. Not because it was invalid, but because they were pretty much on their own at that point, the anti-smokers were on a roll and have been ever since.

Factually the tobacco companies were right but because smoking is damaging to health they didn’t have a chance of getting their point heard as the scientific proof of real harm emerged during the 1960s and has continued to be the justification for everything that has changed since. Every anti-smoking policy or restriction that has been introduced since then has been justified with a reminder of the enormous harm tobacco smoking does to human health.

It’s a pity it never occurred to Lennox Johnston to wonder why he found it surprisingly easy to quit the first time, but it took “two agonising years” the second time. Surely the role of nicotine was the same in both cases and what that gives us straight away is the clue that nicotine isn’t the difficulty: the perception of ‘ease’ or ‘difficulty’ – even ‘agony’ – results from other variables, and that’s why expert hypnotherapy can usually resolve the matter on a single occasion but NRT does not.

The medical establishment thought Johnston was wrong, in fact they ignored him for years and don’t even talk about him now. The tobacco companies thought it was just a habit, as did virtually all smokers at the time. Some still do, despite all this mad nicotine propaganda that is really just marketing for NRT dressed up as medical orthodoxy.

The irony is, the medical establishment were in fact quite correct in the first place. So now it seems as if I’m the mad eccentric, when all I’m pointing out is exactly what everyone knew anyway before Lennox Johnston came along. If they had only stuck to their initial assessment that he was the mad eccentric, then they could have remained quite correct all along and we could have avoided this crazy detour around and around and around the poison nicotine, which is not the real reason people struggle to quit through their own efforts, as I explained in Volume One.

Lennox Johnston lived until he was 86, surviving long enough to see his initially-scorned pronouncements adopted as the standard medical view.

Doubt if I will. Probably won’t get the credit either – but then, neither did Johnston -which is why none of us had ever heard of him!

Filed under: Nicotine, Smoking, The Book, The Campaign by Chris
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“In a multicenter, randomized, double-blind phase II clinical trial, 638 men and women aged 18-65 who smoked an average of 10 cigarettes per day during the previous year, without a period of abstinence of more than 3 months, where put on placebo, bupropion (another drug used as a smoking cessation aid, brand name Zyban®), or different treatment schedules of varenicline for 7 weeks. Subjects were tested for continuous quitting by measuring exhaled carbon monoxide. After one year, the success rates were 14.4%, 6.3% and 4.9% for varenicline, bupropion and placebo, respectively.”

That was from WikiNews, August 15 2006. Link to this article at the end of this post.

This is interesting because it demonstrates what we can expect in long-term results from new medications (boosted by hype and fresh expectations) compared to old ones which no longer are. Elsewhere on this site I have quoted results for willpower alone from various studies giving us figures of anywhere between 4% to 8% when the results are reviewed at one year. So the placebo (dummy medication) figure given above, 4.9%, is entirely consistent with that. But look how Zyban (bupropion) had also fallen within the normal placebo or willpower range by 2006, whereas earlier reports had suggested it had long-term outcomes of around 13% to 14% - same as the new varenicline (champix, chantix) scores here. So will Champix too fall back within the expected range for willpower or dummy pills once all the hype has passed?

It seems likely. We have certainly seen that with Nicotine Replacement products which were credited with 10% to 20% success rates when the University of Iowa study was carried out in 1992, but we now know from several different independent studies that the current outcomes at one year are a miserable 5% to 6%, once again well within the willpower range.

So this indicates that even in 2006, the long-term outcomes of this so-called “new wonder drug” were no better than the previous “wonder drug” Zyban, which is no longer even managing a miserable 14% success rate now that it isn’t regarded by anyone as a wonder drug any more. Clearly, the difference is entirely accounted for by suggestion and heightened expectation.

That’s not science. That’s marketing. And a complete waste of precious NHS resources.

WikiNews August 15 2006

Hypnotherapy works best, according to the study by the University of Iowa. Find out more in the Evidence section of this site, and here.

Meanwhile, the reports of bad reactions are piling up just as I predicted last year (link).

Filed under: Champix/Chantix, Drugs on Trial, Smoking by Chris
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Scrap the smoking cessation programme. As I demonstrated with all the evidence from the various government reports in “The NHS Lie Exposed” there is no significant difference between what smokers can achieve by themselves using willpower and the long term outcomes of NHS help, ie. when followed up at one year after “treatment”. Independent corroboration of those facts here.

Notice how Amanda Sandford from Cash In On Smoking And Health (A.S.H.) tries to suggest that there is convincing evidence to the contrary. This is because A.S.H. is operating entirely to support drug company products in the smoking cessation field, that is all they do. They hammer on and on about “nicotine addiction” and got into legal trouble when they tried to rubbish success claims for the Allen Carr (non-drug) method. None of the drug company products have ever achieved the success rate that Allen Carr’s Easyway International Group proved in court (53%), and A.S.H. were forced to apologise and pay Easyway’s costs, YET THEY DO NOT ENDORSE THE EASYWAY METHOD - which proves they are not really a “public health charity” but a shop window for the drug companies posing as a public health charity.

Sandford claims that:

“…studies into the benefits of nicotine patches and gums were ‘robust’ and that ‘all the evidence points to relying on willpower alone is not terribly successful.”

The unnamed Department of Health spokeman claimed that the Sydney University team’s anaylsis of 511 studies was:

“…inconsistent with a very well established evidence-base. Smokers that attempt to quit without assistance are significantly less likely to quit successfully than those who quit with support. The unsupported quit rate is around 4 per cent at one year. This is doubled when a smoker uses stop smoking medicines, and quadrupled when a smoker uses the NHS Stop Smoking Services - where smokers get both medicine and behavioural support.”

This is simply untrue. The claim of a 15% success rate which originates from the Fergusson report and is the supposed basis for the “four times more likely to succeed” slogan was only achieved by a process of cherry picking, weeding out all the participants that the report’s authors thought less likely to succeed because of socio-economic factors. That is bogus. The Borland report, on the other hand, found only a 6.5% success rate at one year follow up for NHS Smoking Cessation Services. Figures for willpower alone we have seen through several reports oscillate between 4% and 8%. In other words, the methods employed by the NHS Stop Smoking Services are an unjustifiable waste of precious public resources and must be scrapped. The Truth Will Out Campaign entirely agrees with this statement:

“Simon Chapman, a professor of public health, said that governments were also guilty of medicalising smoking cessation and of making giving up sound harder than it actually is.”

Yes, and so are A.S.H. The fact is, they don’t WANT you to quit. They want you to smoke, then try the gum, then smoke, then try the patches, then smoke, then try the lozenges, then smoke, then try the micro-tab, then smoke, then try the inhalator-thingy…

Quit Smoking In One Session With Hypnotherapy!

Of course I believe the money would be better spent on hypnotherapy based on my own experience as a hypnotherapist over the last decade, and also the evidence reproduced in the book and on this site. However I am no longer under any illusion that evidence will change these things. The opposition to change is ideological and has far more to do with money, power and influence than it has to do with evidence.

No, the thing which will really force a change is the fact that there isn’t any money - not for hypnotherapy, not for nicotine replacement poisoning, not for the Champix Suicide Pills, not for that freaky Zyban (it’s an anti-depressant! No it’s not, it’s an anti-smoking pill! No it’s not, it’s a cure for hiccups! No wait, it’s…)

There’s no money for any of it. All sorts of things are going to be cut, but the things that will be cut first are the ones that don’t work anyway, and EVERYBODY KNOWS THAT N.R.T. DOESN’T BLOODY WORK! And Champix is killing people, and damaging a lot more. Scrap the lot! Stop wasting prescious NHS resources on this bullshit!

Filed under: Champix/Chantix, Drugs on Trial, Smoking, The Campaign by Chris
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by Chris Holmes

*Update: If you or a loved one has suffered a bad reaction to Champix and you are based in the U.K., you can report it to the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) here.  The more people do that the clearer the true picture will become.  Protect others!  Report it. 

Several times I have been asked about the options for suing Pfizer - the manufacturer of Champix Chantix - for damages over the horrific side effects some smokers taking the drug have suffered.  Such claims are already under way.  Lawyers in the USA and Canada are offering advice on this and this is only the beginning.

I cannot give any kind of legal advice, and I will refrain from commenting on the matter too because that is not my area of expertise.  I do believe that what we are now seeing is only the tip of the iceberg though, so if you have an interest in these matters you can expect the relevant facts to be changing as time progresses.  Just a few links that you might find useful to begin with, after which I advise you to use the search engines to find out more:

http://www.docken.com/

http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Three+women+file+class+action+lawsuit+over+Pfizer+quit+smoking+drug/2686782/story.html

http://www.aboutlawsuits.com/chantix-160/

http://www.aboutlawsuits.com/topics/champix/

http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2008/07/10/widow-sues-pfizer-over-chantix-after-husbands-suicide/

http://www.furiousseasons.com/movabletype/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=1134

http://www.uslaw.com/lawsuits/Chantix+Suicide?itemid=5

http://www.topix.com/forum/health/bipolar-disorder/THQ07G6LQAHTSM8OV

Other Useful Stuff:

Central Hypnotherapy

The Drug That Never Was

Filed under: Champix/Chantix, Drugs on Trial, Publicity, Smoking, The Campaign by Chris
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by Chris Holmes

Now Meet Doug Wilson

What have I been saying all this time?  That tobacco smoking has been MISTAKEN for an addiction but is really just a compulsive habit.  How did I discover this?  By finding that a single hypnotherapy session can shut it down easily, cravings and all, with no weight gain and no side effects.  This I have done with thousands of smokers over the last ten years.  I am also trying to explain to the world that cravings are not withdrawal symptoms and that they are unconnected to nicotine levels in the system, which is why a smoker can get an impulse to reach for a cigarette when they have recently put one out (eg. when bored or whilst socialising) or whilst wearing a nicotine patch.

Another factor that helped me to understand the differences between a Compulsive Habit and a real drug addiction was my own personal experiences with real addictions and other compulsive habits - various drug habits, a drink habit and other, non-substance habits.  Here is another chap who has had similar life experiences which have caused him to notice the curious differences between drug addiction and a tobacco habit.  As you read this, note particularly how Doug has realised that the “I want a cigarette” impulse (craving) is not the same as withdrawal, and once he has actually lit it he often finds that he doesn’t “want” it much at all, and often doesn’t finish it.  He can’t explain that, but I can: cravings feel like a need or a desire, but they are really only mimicking bodily needs.  The Subconscious is sending a ‘prompting’ signal to repeat the habitual behaviour, but it sends it via the body, using the body as a signalling system to convey an impression to the conscious awareness that something is ‘desired’ or ‘needed’, when in fact only the signal makes it seem so.  It is VERY effective, but because the signal is only prompting the smoker to pick up the cigarette and light it, as soon as that is done the signal disappears.  The rest of it is smoked out of a mixture of habit and expectation, but already the compulsive urge (sense of need) is gone.  That’s why some smokers put it out halfway through or even put it down in an ashtray and forget all about it.

We get lots of cravings, they’re not all about tobacco.  They are compulsive urges, not withdrawal symptoms.  Read what Doug says about withdrawal.

Not a Bodily Need

Don’t get me wrong, cravings can certainly FEEL like a physical need - and that can be utterly, utterly convincing but if it were true, it would still be there after the hypnotherapy session but it’s not.  Now read this bit from Doug again:

“The part I don’t like about “I’m quitting” is the “I want a cigarette voice”. It seems inconsequential. But what are the symptoms of schizophrenia? The voice can drive you nuts. The voice - is awful. You’d think, with the amount of work I do on my brain and the amount of writing I do on the subject I’d have a plan. Nope. I have people call me and write me for help with addictions. They ask for help understanding the brain and I offer them what I’ve come to understand. I know it’s just a voice. I know it’s just my brain. I know I won’t go clinically insane when I quit. I know that if have to listen to the voice say, “I want a cigarette”, a thousand times a day, I’ll be in better shape than I am now. You’d think I’d be anxious to get started. Nope. The voice sucks. It takes over. It hounds. Pesters. Grates. I get mad. I wanna smash it. I get annoyed, antsy, edgy and restless. But I don’t have a single physical withdrawal symptom. Weird.”

The Factual Explanation

The key is, the part of the brain sending the “I want” message is the Subconscious, and the decision to quit smoking was made by the conscious mind.  The Subconscious knows nothing about it.  All it knows is, you’re not responding to the prompting message so it sends another, and another… driving you up the wall until you want to smash something.  But along comes the Expert Hypnotherapist and explains the conscious decision to the Subconscious - and all the reasons for it (very important) - and the fact that tobacco companies were LYING when they told us all that tobacco was useful or pleasant in some way (even more important) and guess what?  The message STOPS.  And as long as the Expert Hypnotherapist makes it very clear that we don’t want that habit replaced with anything else (like food or chocolate), then that won’t happen either.  Nicotine has nothing to do with it.  The nicotine tale is a lie, and if it wasn’t for the loony GP I introduce in the next post, no-one would be regarding this particular habit as if it were a drug addiction anyway.

practice website

The Drug That Never Was

Filed under: Hypnotherapy, Nicotine, Smoking, The Book by Chris
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By Chris Holmes

The Non-Smoker Tries a Cigarette

Remember your first cigarette?  Or to be more precise, do you remember the first time you inhaled tobacco smoke properly and experienced the effect on the way you felt, physically and mentally?

If there was no alcohol in your system already at the time - or any other recreational drug like cocaine, amphetamine or cannabis - if you were - like myself - eight years old and hiding at the bottom of your friend Ian’s garden having helped him steal a (now rather crumpled) Embassy No.1 from his Mam’s packet, and a single match… after a few puffs on that, you may have felt like this:

Nauseous… head fuzzy… feel rather sick and faint… got that uncomfortable feeling like I don’t know where to put myself… feel really unwell… don’t feel safe… bowels churning… feel rotten, very definitely ill.  Poisoned.  Really want to feel normal again, regret trying this…

So I lay down on the grass and waited, feeling stunned and very sick.  It would be four whole years before I tried tobacco again.

Now of course, there are a lot of chemicals in tobacco smoke, not just nicotine.  But nicotine was certainly in there, and according to the British Medical Association’s Illustrated Medical Dictionary (Dorling Kindersley, 2002 - I have it open in front of me)… nicotine “stimulates the central nervous system, thereby reducing fatigue, increasing alertness, and improving concentration.”

Really?  Then how come I was lying there like a stuck pig watching the sky whirl round?  Also, why does the same medical dictionary include amongst the side effects of nicotine replacement therapy “nausea, headache, palpitations, cold or flu-like symptoms”?

After The Sly Smoke at School

As we headed back into the main building Stuart said, as he often did: “You know lads, I really feel ready for Double Physics now!  I feel energised, alert… the only problem is that my noticeably-increased powers of concentration might give me away this afternoon!  Better stash these cigs somewhere…”

It was a hazard of which we were all too keenly aware.  Anyone who works in a school will be able to spot the smokers - full of life, really alert, always concentratin’… come to think of it we had a bit of an unfair advantage, didn’t we?  No wonder we all did so well.

The Non-Smoker Tries A Nicotine Patch

Many years later, long after I had ditched tobacco I found myself putting the finishing touches to a book about nicotine and smoking (working title: Whose Stupid Idea Was All That Then?) when it suddenly occurred to me that although I had tried tobacco when I was a non-smoker and found it stunningly nauseating… experienced tobacco smoke as a regular smoker and grown accustomed to it but it never seemed beneficial… and also tried Nicotine Replacement Poisoning as a regular smoker and found it slightly weird and pointless, I had never tried nicotine alone as a non-smoker. What would it be like?  Perhaps, all those years ago in Ian’s garden I had been overwhelmed by all the other poisons in the smoke.  Maybe, if I just tried “therapeutic nicotine” all by itself, nicotine would indeed ”stimulate the central nervous system, thereby reducing fatigue, increasing alertness, and improving concentration.” After all, that’s what the British Medical Association say it does.

The Experiment

So I obtained a single nicotine patch, a NiQuitin CQ 21mg 24-hour patch.  I also put by a pen and some paper upon which to make notes of the experience as I went along. I didn’t really intend to leave it on for the full 24 hours but I did aim to leave it on for most of the day, just to monitor the experience.  As it turned out, it didn’t quite happen that way.  What follows is directly quoted from Nicotine: The Drug That Never Was:

“This was at 10.15 on a Sunday morning, April 22nd 2007.  We were planning to take the kids to the park at about eleven, which I was looking forward to because it was a nice day.  This is an exact transcript of the notes I made at the time.

10.15 am.  Stuck patch on inside upper left arm.

10.20 am.  Tingling in both hands, mild tightening feeling in the throat.

10.25 am.  Feel nauseous, patch burning skin a bit.

10.30 am.  Feel like blood pressure is up, not a pleasant feeling.  Tense.  Uncomfortable, want to take it off actually.  More nauseous, feel a bit ill.  Patch really burning.  Bowels upset a bit.

10.35 am.  Head fuzzy.  Feel rather sick.  Got that feeling like I don’t know where to put myself.  Feel really uncomfortable and irritable now.

10.37 am.  Took patch off.  Don’t feel safe.  Big red mark on arm.  Hands/wrists aching.  Feel sick and faint, balance and even speech abnormal.  Wrists and hands quite red.  Bowels churning.  Feel rotten, very definitely ill.  Poisoned.  Really want to feel normal again, regret trying this.

10.50 am.  Still feel just as rotten, but feeling of real alarm that made me take it off now subsiding.  Just feel ill.

“The patch was only in contact with my skin for 22 minutes.  Before I began the experiment I felt fine - healthy and in good spirits.  Now I felt absolutely terrible, really unwell and although I don’t usually scare easy…” [as a former intravenous drug user over many years, I've done some pretty mad and dangerous things] “…actually afraid to leave the patch on any longer.  But here’s the thing - according to the B.M.A., nicotine:

“stimulates the central nervous system, thereby reducing fatigue, increasing alertness, and improving concentration.”

“So, did “therapeutic nicotine” make me feel more alert, able to concentrate better, as the B.M.A. described?  Well, by the time I took the patch off I was very nauseous, anxious, irritable and no longer able or willing to hold a normal conversation - so I would have to say no, it certainly did not.  Well, why not?  If that is what nicotine does, that is what it does.  I would have noticed.  It just made me feel poisoned, and actually it did remind me of the first cigarette I ever tried, when I was eight.  My pal Ian Coates stole a single Embassy No.1 from his mum, and we hid at the bottom of his garden and smoked it.  It left me feeling pretty much like the experience I described above, but with a foul taste in my mouth as well.  It was years before I tried one again, and even then it wasn’t because I liked it the first time.  It was just because I wasn’t allowed to, and because smoking makes you look grown-up and cool, despite being twelve and pimply with awful hair and silly clothes.  And feeling very queasy, if not actually vomiting.

“At eleven o’clock, we all left for the park.  Sure enough I felt very queasy, delicate and anxious that I might suddenly need the toilet - that IBS feeling.  I really didn’t want to go out at all now, I felt more like going for a lie down, which I hardly ever feel like doing even when I am ill.  Of course, some fool might suggest that the dose was too high for a non-smoker, or that I was irresponsible to try that without medical advice, as if that were the reason it made me ill.  But that’s ridiculous: none of us took medical advice before we tried our first cigarette, did we?  And very few kids start with a low-nicotine cigarette - certainly not my generation anyway, or the previous one.  So it was, in fact, an experiment that roughly replicated many initial, real smoking experiences but this time focussing entirely on nicotine itself - and guess what?  Nicotine just makes you feel ill, because it is nothing but a poison.  I’m not saying you can’t get used to it - professional boxers get used to being slammed in the face with a fist to the point where they hardly notice it, and I’m sure that stimulates the central nervous system too, but that don’t make it medicinal, baby.”

Talking of Crazy Experiments That Aren’t Exactly Scientific…

Who discovered penicillin?  That’s right, Fleming.  Who invented the hypodermic syringe?  Louis Pasteur, correct.  Both well known names in the history of medicine because the things they gave us are used by millions of people all over the world.  So: who invented nicotine replacement therapy?

You don’t know, do you?

Well, he was also the man who insisted that tobacco smoking was not just a filthy habit, as everyone had been quite happy to regard it for several centuries.  He insisted it was a drug addiction, and he claimed in a letter to The Lancet that he had ‘proven’ this by gathering together a group of 35 habitual smokers and - with their permission - injected them with 1mg of nicotine whenever they felt like they wanted a cigarette.  He insisted that because the impulse to reach for a cigarette then subsided, this proved that the reason they smoked was because they were addicted to nicotine.

The man was a Glaswegian GP called Dr. Lennox Johnston (1899-1986) and the main reason you have never heard of him is because everyone thought he was loopy.  He isn’t credited with inventing Nicotine Replacement Poisoning because he wasn’t suggesting using nicotine to get people OFF smoking.  In fact, that would be an insane suggestion from anyone who was insisting that the smoking problem was a result of addiction to that very poison.  No, he simply used that method to try to demonstrate his theory that smokers’ cravings are in fact a physical “need” for nicotine itself - but the experiment doesn’t even do that in reality.  If I had still been a smoker when I tried that patch experiment, I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to smoke for quite some time after that, just as I never wanted one when I had a hangover or felt under par for any other reason.  Lennox Johnston’s 35 volunteers were habitual smokers so they were more used to being poisoned than I was, but if they didn’t feel much inclined to smoke for a bit after an injection of a lethal insecticide (nicotine) then we shouldn’t be surprised.

Short-term reactions to interventions of that sort are no proof of anything.  This is why the Advertising Standards Agency recently blocked an advert by the NHS Stop Smoking Services which tried to use reported cessation rates at four weeks as if they were real success rates.  They said it was misleading, and I have already shown in the Evidence section of this site how the difference between those short-term results and the real outcomes at a one-year interval can be as great as 90% short-term, falling to 8% by the end of the year we have to conclude that the ASA are right to object.

Since I started this Campaign in March 2008, I have often heard it suggested that NRT products have been ‘properly’ tested in scientific trials, so I must be talking nonsense when I say they are utterly bogus and have no long-term effectiveness to speak of at all.  Did any of those people suggesting that know that in the original trials that got NRT passed as if it were a medication in the first place, it was passed on the basis of it’s performance at SIX WEEKS.  In smoking cessation that is NOT proof of efficacy and it should never have happened at all.

practice website

Filed under: Drugs on Trial, Nicotine, Smoking, The Book, The Campaign by Chris
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If you were ever under the impression that the Subconscious mind was just a robotic ‘lizard brain’ that blindly obeys instructions from a hypnotist, you couldn’t be more wrong!  Many people get that idea from seeing stage hypnotists, who are deliberately misleading their audience but only getting away with creating the impression that they have influence over other people’s minds because the people in the audience know virtually nothing about the true nature of their own Subconscious!

The Missing Information

You know when you were growing up, and first making sense of the world around you, and being taught things… did anyone mention a Subconscious mind to you?  No, me neither!  We were all raised and educated as if the Subconscious mind does not exist. So by the time we reach an age when we start hearing that word mentioned from time to time, we don’t really know what to do with the idea of a Subconscious mind, because it does not immediately fit in to the way we regard our own mind.  By that point in our development the conscious mind thinks IT IS the mind, so at first it doesn’t like the sound of this ‘Subconscious mind’ and tends to push the idea away.

This is particularly true of very analytical people who tend to cling to logic, rationality and scientific models of reality, some of whom (not all, obviously!) seem to feel a need to attack or pour scorn upon anything that looks as if it must be outside of their comfort zone.  A few of these people also come to suppose that the only reason other people don’t think exactly the same way as they do themselves is because those folk aren’t as clever as the strictly rational sort.  Here is a typical example, taken from a recent review of Nicotine: The Drug That Never Was by someone who seems (to me) to have only read the excerpts from the book published on this site:

“…according to Mr Holmes, quitting is as easy as a 2 hour session appealing to your mysterious subconscious, that (conveniently) only a hynotherapist can communicate with.  You can believe in his miracle cure, and no doubt hand over a large sum of cash in the process, or you can use the method that actually works, and costs nothing - quit cold turkey, and promise yourself you will not smoke just for today. I did that 6 months ago, and my “subconcious” had F-all to do with it.”

This attitude is quite commonplace, which is why I mention several times in the book that “the conscious mind does not believe in the Subconscious, except perhaps in theory.  And by extension, doesn’t believe in hypnotherapy either until encountering the results for real.”  Notice how the writer here is suggesting that I charge large sums of money without bothering to ask about that, dismisses hypnotherapy by choosing the phrase “miracle cure” and refers to his own subconscious mind at the end in a way that suggests there is no such thing!  Not his fault, no-one ever taught him anything about it, or he would know already that it is not ‘mysterious’ to me, nor did I ever suggest that only hypnotherapists can communicate with it - tell that to advertisers, they’ve been communicating with it very effectively for a long time now.  Of course, once you understand the Subconscious mind’s view of the world, you are far less likely to be influenced by any of that.

Not Rational = Dangerous!

Sometimes ‘rationalists’ even suggest that mental processing (thinking) that is not within the strict bounds of logic is dangerous, and there is certainly evidence for that: for example when people first dreamed up the idea that we might be able to design a machine that could fly - and maybe even reach for the heavens, walk upon the moon, that sort of thing - well, many of the original pioneers of that sort of fanciful nonsense came unstuck!  ”Serves them right too”, the strictly logical people of the time would have probably been telling one another, “after all, if man had been meant to fly, he’d have been born with wings!”

My contention is that if man had been meant to always be strictly logical, he wouldn’t have been born with an imagination.  And indeed some are not, or at least with such a shrivelled and weak imagination that they hardly ever use it.  So maybe what really happens is that we all play to our strengths, and the people with feeble imaginations develop their analytical faculties more, whilst those with fertile imaginations may find logical analysis a bit dull compared to letting their imaginations run wild.  And the human world needs plenty of both types - if they are types - because when you need someone to be the financial director of a business, you definitely want the conscious analytical faculties to be confidently brought to bear in that endeavour, but if you want someone to design a new Ferrari or stage the opening of the next Olympic Games, Mr. Logical would be fucking useless.

The Imagination and The Analyst (and the real issue behind the Snow/Leavis debate)

Ever since ‘le petit enlightenment’, as I like to call it, the marvellous role of the Subconscious Imaginary has been less appreciated, even dismissed. “Oh, that’s just your imagination!” is a common expression for demonstrating how little you care for the concerns of another person, but within that phrase there is also a suggestion that “imaginary” = “not real” = “not worthy of serious consideration”.

That notion is really a result of the Subconscious-shaped gap in our general education.  And it needs fixing, because in reality the role of the imagination in human affairs has been every bit as vital as the role of the intellect.

(An aside for those familiar with the Snow/Leavis reference: “There is only one way out of all this,” Snow had argued. “It is, of course, by rethinking our education.”  He was right, but probably didn’t realise that what we really need to include now is detailed information about the Subconscious mind so that it no longer seems “mysterious” to anyone!)

When Rene Descartes famously declared: “I think, therefore I am”, what he didn’t realise was that we are thinking more than we think we are.  Humans have at least two modes of thinking: analytical thinking which our conscious faculties operate, and Subconscious thinking which we call “dreaming”. When we do that whilst awake, we call it “daydreaming”.  Examples of a finer quality are also known as “inspiration” or even “genius”.

“Oh, he’s just a dreamer!” is another familiar dismissal of the kind of person who spends more time exercising their Subconscious intelligence than their conscious faculties.  But where would we be without the dreamers?  Every great invention, each quantum leap in technological development, any stunning performance or inspirational work of art, every great engineering project… they all began with a daydream.

Just look at the way many modern realities were the mere fantasies of yesteryear:

Five centuries ago Leonardo DiCaprio was producing detailed drawings of a Ford Capri that might actually have done 0-60 in 7.5 seconds if only they’d had petrol back then, but all they had was candle grease.  They also had no Highway Code, which is why Leonardo wrote The DaVinci Code.

The only reason Britain has the Channel Tunnel today is because Margaret Thatcher loved taking magic mushrooms. That’s why she hardly slept, but during one particularly heavy trip she had visions of a tunnel under the sea that could bring closer together the two nations that love each other best in the world: the English and the French.

Certain thrilling pastimes of the modern world would not exist at all if it hadn’t been for World War II fighter ace Douglas Bader.  Hurtling towards the ground in his flaming Spitfire, he paused before ejecting just a little longer than he should have done, because he was enjoying the weightless sensation so much that he started dreaming of ways to re-create it just for sport.  That hesitation cost him all his limbs and almost his head, yet he lived to fly again, and that inspirational moment gave us the luge, the bobsleigh and at least two of the rides at Alton Towers.

Bruce Springsteen was hiding in a cave one day, because he had chopped down his father’s cherry tree, when he noticed a spider building a web. Just for fun he destroyed the web, and was surprised to see that the spider was apparently not deterred by this and simply built the web back up again from scratch.  What really impressed Springsteen - who was later to become world-famous as Robert The Boss - was that no matter how many times he meanly tore down the completed web, the spider would patiently build it back up again.  After several days of this, Bruce emerged from the cave inspired to create something that no-one could ever get rid of, which is why the World Wide Web was born in the USA.   Although Bruce wasn’t, actually, he was born in Cardiff.  He only swam to America because he wanted to be a cowboy.  And also to get away from his dad, who was absolutely fuming about the tree because it was the third time.  But I reckon it was his own fault really, he should have just bought the kid that guitar and then maybe none of that axe unpleasantness would have happened.  It was Lizzie Borden and the harpsichord all over again.

For most of the time humans have been on this planet, a sudden massive heart attack would have meant a long and quick death.  (”Long” as in “dead for a long time”.)  Then one day in 1820 a Tasmanian surgeon called Dr Lucian C. Gore was surprised by a mouse in his summerhouse, and began to wonder what would happen if he used industrial cutting gear to rip open the chest cavity of the heart-attack victim before the relatives had time to object and replace the damaged organ with the healthy, fast-beating heart of a fieldmouse.  Gore never succeeded with this technique himself, and was soon arrested - which surprised no-one at the time - and yet his apparently crazy idea was adapted later and although Gore’s name is hardly known to the public, in medical circles he is often referred to as the psychotic father of modern organ transplant surgery.

When Martin Luther famously nailed that note to the door of 10 Downing Street in the Nineteen Seventeen Hundreds, which said: “I have a dream!” …of course no-one took any notice, but they certainly felt very silly later when that phrase became one of the most inspirational moments of public oratory since the Declaration of Independence was read out by Ho Chi Minh.

Finally - and I think most convincingly of all - who would have thought that when Captain James T. Kirk of the Starship Enterprise flipped open his ‘communicator’ and said the immortal words: “Beam me up, Scotty!” in the 1960s that only 100 years later we would be beaming around all over the place in  reality, eh?  I mean I know we’re still only going to work or to the shopping mall… and we haven’t quite solved the problem of how to go more than four miles in under a minute without disintegrating yet, but we’re working on it baby.  We’re working on it.  Someone is bound to dream up a brilliant solution sooner or later.  That’s why we dominate the Earth.

News from the archives: 1968 “Today in Memphis Dr Martin Luther King was shot dead by a lone assassin.  But what of it?  As we all know, he was just a dreamer, wasn’t he?”

But as Lennon sang, he’s not the only one.

Now, can you imagine King’s most famous speech being written - or even funnier, being delivered - by Richard Dawkins?  Analytical thinking is all very useful, as far as it goes, but to achieve something like that it takes both vision and passion, and for that we need the wonderful Subconscious Imaginary, which has the power to stir the soul of thousands of people simultaneously and change the world in a single afternoon. For real.  And at a moment like that, any contribution from the poor little conscious mind of any speaker would not have been noticed at all.

On A Lighter Note:

Just have a look at this review of Nicotine: The Drug That Never Was that someone posted on Amazon.co.uk:

This book was hard work. The author sounds very angry, I could feel the tension from the pages as I was reading - it made me want to smoke more. I made a very expensive mistake buying this book. Just wanted to warn others as I had been swayed by the previous comments which were so positive.

Filed under: Hypnotherapy, The Book by Chris
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Edzard Ernst, if we are to believe what certain hacks tell us, is in danger of losing his position at Exeter University - but it has nothing to do with his own behaviour, of course!  This is a link to a particularly lame piece from the Guardian’s Sarah Boseley which tries to suggest that the reason nobody seems to want to fund “the scourge of complementary medicine” is because The Prince of Wales has somehow made it so.

After 17 years of CAM-bashing, with hardly anything positive to say about Complementary Medicine at all, it could just be that everyone’s sick to death of the guy, except of course for all the pathological cynics like Sarah Boseley, Simon Singh, Ben Goldacre etc etc who seem to have the simplistic, collective notion that all CAM therapists are “quacks”.  The repeated suggestion they make in the media is that private therapists make vast fortunes by hoodwinking people who, because they are ‘deluded’ or ‘vulnerable’ pay willingly for therapies that they often seem quite happy with but their opinion doesn’t count.

The only thing that does count - according to these few cynics - is the relentlessly negative outpourings of Ernst’s unit which can be summed up thus: whatever therapy he’s looking at, after a selective review of previous studies the verdict is that there’s no evidence that it works and it could even be dangerous.

Has it not occurred to any of these people that for many, many years millions of people have been using these therapies and returning to them because they find them effective?  Not only that, but all those people have families and friends who will also have been aware of that, so although it is often said that only 25% of the population use CAM therapies, a hell of a lot more will have heard about the results.  The only people who dismiss those first-hand opinions are pathological cynics, and although those people are often noisy, opinionated and usually rude to anyone who tries to explain that they’ve got it wrong, they are actually in a very small minority.  They are the only people with an axe to grind about all this, and they aren’t doing that for the sake of the people who use CAM therapies at all!  They have nothing but contempt for people who use CAM therapies… but no-one else does.

So Ernst has had an exciting time, drawing attention to himself as the “scourge of Complementary Medicine” as Boseley rather tellingly put it - which is why she approves - forgetting that officially he is supposed to be objective.  But no-one normal who is aware of Ernst at all would ever regard him as impartial, he is quite clearly the champion of the pathological cynics and was from the start, although many people didn’t realise that at first.

Some of these Ernst Groupies call themselves skeptics, but they are quite wrong to do so.  I work with skeptics all the time, and I don’t find their skepticism a problem at all.  Hypnotherapists are used to the fact that most new clients are skeptical, which is another reason I object to the term “faith-based therapies” which is repeatedly used to denigrate CAM therapies in general. Most of my new clients don’t have any particular faith in hypnotherapy, in fact they are usually quite surprised by the results.  Of course we partly have the likes of Ernst to thank for that low level of expectation, but it is also partly caused by the fact that many of my clients will have tried to fix the problem through their own efforts previously with no lasting success, so their conscious expectations are fairly low because of that.

The “faith-based” suggestion is a snidey way of making out that the results don’t go beyond a placebo effect caused by their own delusions, which is extremely patronising and quite inaccurate.  Although the majority of people are fairly skeptical of all unfamiliar things, they are not cynics. Most people who try CAM therapies are simply being practical: if you want to get rid of a problem you just try one thing after another until you find the thing that works for you.  If the cynics had their way, you wouldn’t have the choice: you would have to take what the doctor recommended even if it kills you (See ‘Trust Me, I’m a Doctor’ on this site, and also the blogpost ‘Daily Mail Article’ in the blog category Drugs On Trial.) 

When I was growing up, if someone said they were “off to see the quack” they meant the doctor, their General Practitioner.  Lately the word has been used by the cynics and a few opinionated hacks to attack the entire field of Complementary Medicine, and what these people are forgetting is that the only people who will agree with those mocking, patronising and extremely negative and ignorant opinions are the cynics of the world.  Edzard Ernst’s publications haven’t made those people the way they are, they were like that already.  He just gave them - briefly - more credibility because of his position, but his “don’t shoot the messenger” suggestion that he uses to deflect criticism is a pathetic attempt to erase himself from “the science”, and nobody with any intelligence will fall for that one!  So, all published studies are simply “the truth” are they, Edzard?  Never mind the intent, never mind the funding, never mind the methodologies… the studies just selected themselves, did they?  The science just happened all by itself, as if by magic, and Ernst is just the guy who told us all what it said, like Moses coming down from the mountain with The Word of God.

No, Ernst was never a simple messenger, he is an author and an instigator, a collaborator with other anti-CAM extremists and a campaigner against CAM - as Boseley says: “unusually outspoken” and “the scourge of Complementary Medicine”.  Not really what we expected from the first ever Professor of Complementary Medicine, because it is so clearly at odds with the everyday experiences of CAM users.  When those people try to explain that, their views and their attempts to report successes are instantly dismissed just because they did not occur under laboratory conditions.  By contrast, Ernst’s activities are given blanket approval despite the fact that the studies he is looking at never involve any professional CAM therapists and he has never been one himself.

So perhaps the only people who think what he has done is admirable, objective or reliable in any way are the pathological cynics who refer to perfectly respectable therapists as “quacks”.  And those people are in such a small minority that I seriously doubt they could fund his work for very long if they all pitched in together with every penny they have.

No-one else is taking him seriously any more, it seems.  The fact is, we do not need this endlessly negative anti-CAM voice at all, because even if he never published another word on the subject we all know, already, what Edzard Ernst would tell us: “There’s no evidence that it works…” apart from all the millions of people who happily use it, but they don’t count… “…and it could even be dangerous…” although it hardly ever is.  Why would anyone waste their valuable resources generating yet more of that kind of unconvincing drivel after being subjected to seventeen years of it already?  And no-one needs Boseley whining on about it either. “We need this voice to tell us what to think”!  You might, Sarah, but no-one else does, evidently, or people would be willing to fund it without a special appeal from you! (Is there a brain in there anywhere?)

If Ernst and Boseley do find themselves out of work sometime though, I reckon they could get together and reinvent themselves as a Keith Harris and Orville tribute act.  ”I wish I could have an original thought, but I can’t!”  ”You can!”  ”I CAN’T!”

To explain the reference for non-UK dwellers: Ernst could be Keith Harris, a ventriloquist whose dummy is a large and generally clueless baby duck, so of course Edzard provides the voice for both.  And if Boseley doesn’t like the idea of being Orville the duck, maybe she shouldn’t play the role of Ernst’s special media mouthpiece and keep mindlessly repeating the word “quack”.  What goes around comes around Sarah.

Filed under: The Campaign by Chris
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