Cold Turkey Quitters Gobble Up Education
Undaunted by a hammering of pharmaceutical industry marketing asserting that only superheroes can quit cold, a rising tide of nicotine stained keyboards are surfing their way to a vastly different message being shared by a rather serious forum.
(PRWEB) April 5, 2004-- The Internet’s oldest website devoted to the art,
science and psychology of taking the cold out of quitting smoking cold turkey
recorded a record 2.1 million hits during March, a 318% increase over March
2003.
Founded in July 1999 as a hard-hitting motivational site
encouraging younger smokers to quit and youth from starting, WhyQuit.com quickly
evolved into the first online smoking cessation resource devoted exclusively to
supporting the education and recovery needs of the nearly 90% of smokers
quitting cold.
Still today, almost all government and health nonprofit
websites continue to strongly advocate the purchase and use of nicotine
replacement therapy (NRT) products while actually discouraging smokers from
trusting their instincts and natural ability to stop using nicotine.
“It
makes no sense,” asserts John R. Polito, WhyQuit’s Charleston, South Carolina
founder and a thirty-year three-pack-a-day smoker who broke free in May 1999
with the aid of online peer support. “Although there is no denying that
unassisted and uneducated cold turkey quitting generates just 10% abstinence at
six months, health policymakers continue to turn their backs on millions of cold
turkey quitters when they know that educating and supporting them could enhance
their odds of success by roughly 400%.”
In September 1999 Joanne Diehl, a
January 1999 Chicago online quitter, joined forces with Polito in co-founding a
free peer quitting support group called Freedom from Tobacco. It added a support
arm to WhyQuit’s growing array of gripping motivational stories.
Although the group gradually attracted a steady stream of quitters, “by
December we were floundering horribly,” recalls Diehl. “It seemed like all but a
handful were relapsing, some four and five times in a row, and nicotine was
everywhere.”
“When a member posted their first message following relapse
the outpouring of group attention and affection was so intense that it seemed to
invite others to follow suit,” recalls Polito. “Once the newness and excitement
of being around other quitters began wearing off, our blend of motivation and
support simply wasn’t cutting it.”
Demoralized, Polito and Diehl were on
the verge of pulling the plug when an email arrived on January 20, 2000. It was
from a Chicago never-smoker named Joel Spitzer offering the unconditional use of
a collection of about eighty short clinic articles sharing the lessons gleaned
during a lifetime spent working with and carefully observing thousands of
successful quitters.
Polito and Diehl were about to discover that
education and dependency understanding was not only a missing ingredient but
vital to any hope of substantially enhancing a member’s prospects for recovery.
Joel Spitzer’s abrupt cessation insights likely started as early as
1972. It was then, as a volunteer smoking prevention speaker with the American
Cancer Society, that he became increasingly consumed by the plight of those for
whom prevention efforts had failed.
He would spend the next 28 years
refining his own understanding while sharing key findings during 325 two-week
quit smoking clinic programs and more than 570 education seminars that touched
almost 100,000 lives.
As Polito fondly recalls, "it was as if Joel
picked-up and cradled Joanne's bleeding heart and my dying spirit while feeding
our ignorance a heavy dose of understanding. His insights were mind boggling."
Central to Spitzer's teachings was the core philosophy of "just one day at a
time" to "never take another puff."
With each passing day a bit more of
Spitzer's work was shared with and embraced by the group. The timing and norms
of physical withdrawal, subconscious trigger reconditioning, conscious thought
fixation, understanding the emotional loss, nicotine as a spoon, avoiding blood
sugar swings, the smoking dream, sleep disruption, weight gain, alcohol
concerns, the nicotine/stress relationship, the arriving lessons seemed almost
endless.
Affectionately dubbed "Joel's Library," the collection was
given center stage at WhyQuit. Always on hand to address individual concerns,
Spitzer agreed to become a forum manager and director of education.
Today Joel’s Library has grown to about ninety articles, Freedom has
amassed more than 200,000 archived and indexed member posts, and WhyQuit serves
as a learning and motivation hub in helping churn-out thousands of highly
educated ex-smokers around the globe.
"I spent the first five weeks of
my quit at another quit smoking site," says Linda Schwartz, a Cleveland pharmacy
manager who has doubled as Freedom's admissions director since 2000. "Too many
silly topics unrelated to quitting and too many failed attempts where people did
not really take quitting seriously brought me to Freedom."
"Our work
evolved over time," recalls Spitzer. "As we gained more and more experience, we
started to get a better sense of how to help people in a virtual world. We had
our growth spurts and our growing pains."
Not only do new arrivals find a
forum that is 100% nicotine free, they are not granted group posting privileges
until all nicotine is out of their body (72 hours), and any relapse - even one
puff of nicotine - permanently revokes group posting privileges.
"It
sounds harsh," says Polito, "but addiction to smoking nicotine with its 50%
adult kill rate is not a game. If we can't convince smokers of the importance of
spending a few hours mastering the principles underlying their dependency then
our chances of supporting their recovery are horrible."
"I attribute a
healthy portion of our growth to other sites telling their members how out of
our minds we must be for being proponents of cold turkey quitting, and how
ridiculous it is for us to expect members to succeed and not relapse," says
Spitzer. "Relapse must be taken seriously if quitting is to
work."
According to Spitzer most professional literature ever produced on
smoking cessation has advice in it with a variation of the statement "don't let
a slip put you back to smoking." "Such advice makes as much sense as telling an
alcoholic 'not to let a drink put you back to drinking,' or a heroin addict,
'don't let a little injection put you back to using,' or for a more graphic
depiction, 'don't let unprotected sex with an HIV infected individual or a
person with other kinds of sexually transmitted disease let you get pregnant or
infected,'" says Spitzer.
How is the explosion in growth impacting the
forum? "We now have so many long-term members providing support that my work is
actually a little easier than it has been," asserts Spitzer. "I can disappear
for hours or even days and when I return the articles and threads I would have
referred new members to in order to address issues raised by their posts have
already been shared by members."
"It seems we're getting more serious
quitters -- people who are reading all that we have available, learning the
messages and then sharing their time and understanding with other members," says
Spitzer.
As a classroom, is there a limit to the forum's growth
potential? "I think we'll continue to grow – at least in readership. If we let
in too many new people at one time our educational message gets diluted. At
times we have no choice but to limit admissions if we're to maintain quality in
offering meaningful help to all who read here," says Spitzer.
In a sad
sort of way governments and health nonprofits are helping keep WhyQuit's
word-of-mouth growth manageable. "They're fully committed to NRT and their only
means of increasing market share is to continue the relentless assault upon cold
turkey," says Polito. "If OTC NRT was truly effective, it would be absurd to
fault them for ignoring real nicotine cessation learning centers but sadly it
isn't."
Although a rash of recent studies paint NRT in far less glowing
terms than current product marketing, according to Polito their results are not
being openly shared by those advocating its use.
A March 2003 study
published in Tobacco Control combined and averaged the results of all seven
over-the-counter patch and gum studies and found that only 7% of participants
were still not smoking at six months.
"That's substantially lower than
an uneducated and unassisted quitter's own natural odds of 10%," says Polito.
A November 2003 study, also in Tobacco Control, asserts that as many as
36.6% of all current nicotine gum users may be chronic long-term users of
greater than six months.
Most recently, a January 2004 study published in
Addiction outlined prior studies examining those attempting to quit by using the
nicotine patch for a second attempt. Amazingly, in one study 0% of second time
patch users succeeded while in the other only 1.6% were still not smoking at six
months.
"A large percentage of smokers participated in NRT studies in
hopes of getting months of free nicotine products," says Polito. "It's pure
fiction to pretend that a significant portion could not sense that they'd been
given a placebo instead. Admitted blinding failures, frustrated expectations,
creative new definitions of quitting, it's a recipe to make billions selling
nicotine to those dependent upon it."
One might think that if 91.2% of
all successful quitters were quitting cold turkey that 91.2% of quitting
resources would be devoted to sharing their secrets, practices and insights. "It
doesn't work that way," says Polito. "Unless you're willing to hold hostage and
charge for the knowledge needed to help smokers break free there is no money to
be made in cold turkey quitting. It almost has to be a labor of love."
In
the five-year history of WhyQuit not a single penny has ever been accepted from
any source for any online work. "We’ve always told those who insist on making a
donation to give to their favorite charity instead," says Spitzer. Even with
Spitzer's articles and work having potential as a book, in his eyes the price is
unacceptable.
"I would want it stipulated that the book could stay on the
Internet for free distribution to all who wanted it," says Spitzer. "I'm not too
sure how many publishers would be interested in taking on a book that the author
was going to give away to as many people as humanly possible."
Thanks to
Bill, one of Freedom's gold club members (a member who has remained nicotine
free for at least one year) Joel's Library is already available at WhyQuit in
electronic PDF book format. Distilled to its basics, quitting isn't necessarily
easy but it is simple - just one day at a time ... Never Take Another
Puff!
###
WhyQuit's Monthly Request Data
Month Year
Requests Percentage
Dec 2002 342,085 2.705%
Jan 2003 715,496 5.658%
Feb 2003 583,075 4.610%
Mar 2003 665,478 5.262%
Apr 2003 601,319
4.755%
May 2003 610,264 4.825%
Jun 2003 572,885 4.530%
Jul 2003
562,374 4.447%
Aug 2003 550,520 4.353%
Sep 2003 653,046 5.164%
Oct
2003 777,761 6.150%
Nov 2003 777,971 6.000%
Dec 2003 658,445 5.078%
Jan 2004 1,159,994 8.947%
Feb 2004 1,470,868 11.344%
Mar 2004
2,186,502 16.854%
Fact References:
1. OTC NRT patch and gum
7% six-month quit smoking rate -A meta-analysis of the efficacy of
over-the-counter nicotine replacement, Hughes JR, Shiffman S. et al, Tobacco
Control 2003 March;12(1):21-7 - http://tc.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/12/1/21?ijkey=5.ko5/Oz4yutI
2.
On-your-own 10% six-month quit smoking rate -Does the OTC patch really double
"your" chances? Polito JR, 2002 April, WhyQuit - http://whyquit.com/whyquit/A_OTCPatch.html
3. 36.6% of
current nicotine gum users chronic users -Persistent use of nicotine replacement
therapy: an analysis of actual purchase patterns in a population based sample,
Shiffman S, Hughes JR, et al, Tobacco Control 2003 November; 12: 310-316 - http://tc.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/abstract/12/3/310
4.
0% of second time patch users not smoking at six months -Recycling with nicotine
patches in smoking cessation, Tonnesen P, et al., Addiction. 1993 April;
88(4):533 - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=8485431&dopt=Abstract
5.
1.6% of second time patch users not smoking at six months - Double blind trial
of repeated treatment with transdermal nicotine for relapsed smokers, Gourlay S.
G., et al. British Medical Journal, 1995 311, 363–366 - http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/abstract/311/7001/363
6.
NRT blinding failure affecting placebo performance - In the following OTC study
only 18.3% of placebo patch users believed that they had received the real
nicotine patch. The authors declare that “the effect of such a blinding failure
would probably be a reduction of the placebo effect.” Nicotine patches in
smoking cessation: a randomized trial among over-the-counter customers in
Denmark, Sonderskov J, et al., Am J Epidemiol 1997;145: 309 to 318, at page 317
- http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=9054234&dopt=Abstract
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Source : http://www.prweb.com/releases/2004/4/prweb116347.htm