Is the Quit Smoking Shot the Best Way to Stop Smoking?
Categorized: stop smoking aids, ways to stop smoking | 1 comment
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It sounds like a great idea, at first. If you want to give up smoking, just go get the quit smoking shot and you’ll be smoke-free for life. Unfortunately, things aren’t that simple. When you investigate the whole program that goes along with the quit smoking injection, it looks like a course of torture rather than a quick fix.
The foundation of the program is the SMART shot. SMART stands for Scopolamine Mediated Anticholinergic Receptor Treatment. Quite a mouth-ful. You may be able to guess from the name that the main ingredient is scopalomine. This is a pretty powerful drug which is used to combat motion sickness these days. In days gone by it was used as an interrogation tool and was actually the original truth serum. The other main drug in the cocktail is Atarax, which is an anti-histamine. Taken in combination, these drugs block the uptake of nicotine in the brain. After the initial injection, the patient continues with scopolamine patches and pills for another two weeks.
Maybe this would be a good way to go if you wanted to get it over with fast. Proponents of the program claim a success rate between 70 and 80%. Not too shabby.
As I mentioned previously, my wife and I are using champix, and one of the biggest drawbacks with it is that it just goes on and on. You gotta take a little blue pill every 12 hours for six months. People who jump off the program too early tend to revert to smoking pretty quickly. The quit smoking shot appeals to the modern attitude of Do it now, do it fast, get it over with.
The whole regimen seems pretty brutal to me. The original form of the stop smoking shot actually consisted of three injections, one behind each ear and one in the butt, so at least the new format only requires a single injection. And they used to use thorazine in the cocktail. Nowadays, the only people who get thorazine on a regular basis are locked up in some state home for the bewildered.
When you come right down to it the quit smoking shot only does what champix does i.e. block the uptake of nicotine in the brain by blocking the receptors. You’re still left with overcoming the habit part of the addiction and that is the hardest part to overcome. I guess it comes down to what I talked about in my previous post. If you believe in medicine and tcchnology it will probably be the optimum way for you to give up smoking. After your done with the injection, patches and pills, though, the only support you get is a weekly conference call. To me, that seems like the weak part of this stop smoking program, it doesn’t deal with the habit.
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Tagged with: Addiction, Health, Nicotine, Quitting, Smoking cessation, Substance Abuse, Tobacco, Tobacco smoking
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[...] said in my previous post about the stop smoking injection that the drugs involved were very powerful, powerful enough to make me uneasy. Critics of the [...]
on January 15, 2010 at 12:17 am