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Physicians Missing

Golden Opportunity to

Teach, Heal and Save Lives

In June, my oldest daughter Carmen graduated as an M.D. from the Medical University of South Carolina. We're extremely proud of Carmen as she graduated #3, 4 or 5 (the exact finish was kept secret) and was the top female grad. But what's shocking is that her class received no formal instruction time in how to counsel patients regarding our nation's leading cause of premature death. What students were instead exposed to was watching doctors advising patients during clinical rotations, primarily in how to prescribe pharmaceutical "cessation" products, very much in line with what the 2004 UK study above seeks to achieve.

I'm about to complete presenting two hour cessation seminars to thousands of inmates in 28 prisons. Not only does each inmate have in hand WhyQuit's quitting tips sheet, they now have access to library copies of "Never Take Another Puff" by Joel. Yes, sadly, many of these inmates will soon be better prepared, knowledge wise, to counsel friends and family regarding cessation, than their own doctors. Why?

What medical students and physicians need to ask themselves is, what dependency recovery learning takes place by slapping on a patch, swallowing a pill, chewing nicotine gum, being hypnotized or when stuck with needles? None, absolutely none. Knowledge truly is a quitting method but that knowledge can never be shared unless known.

Yes, practicing physicians are short for actual patient contact time but if the doctor has a smoking patient sitting and waiting in a patient examination room, they have before them a captive audience and golden opportunity to dim the lights and treat the patient with a dose of education. Short 15 to 30 minute video clips played upon an exposed wall could teach patients: (1) the price their body is paying, (2) how and why their mind became nicotine's slave (3) how to arrest their dependency, or (4) relapse prevention clips at follow-up appointments.

The enslaved mind's priorities teacher was long ago fooled into believing that arriving nicotine was a species survival event, every bit as real and important as eating. This isn't some "nasty little habit" but nicotine's presence or absence causing brain neuro-chemicals to flow or not flow, rewarding anticipation or compliance with dopamine pathway "aaah" sensations and punishing abstinence with insula generated anxieties and craves. These amazing behavior control pathways are believed to generate the most vivid or powerful memories the mind can record, memories that quickly over-write and bury nearly all remaining memory of life without nicotine. The new drug addict is compelled to believe that nicotine use defines who they are, gives them their edge, helps them cope and that life without it would be horrible. If the physician isn't going to tell the patient the truth about what's happened to their brain then who will?

Every physician encountering chemically enslaved patients must have some means of instructing patients regarding the time needed to rid the mind of all nicotine and achieve peak withdrawal, and the law of addiction, the fact that they are not fighting a whole pack or even a whole cigarette but just that one powerful puff of nicotine that would, within 8-10 seconds, cause roughly 40% of their brain's nicotinic-type acetylcholine receptors to be occupied, creating a powerful dopamine explosion that their mind's priorities teacher would find nearly impossible, in the short term, to ignore.

Patients need to understand how nicotine was their spoon and the importance of again learning to eat regular meals now that nicotine, via fight or flight pathways, is no longer pumping stores fats and sugars into their bloodstream with each puff. They need to realize that encountering and extinguishing their mind's conditioned feeding cues, their crave triggers, is good not bad, as with each extinguishment they are rewarded with the return of another aspect of life, a time, place, location, person or emotion during which their brain once expected the arrival of a new supply of nicotine.

They need to be taught not to run and hide from smoking thoughts rattling about inside the conscious thinking mind but to grab hold of each and closely examine it for truth. You want "one"? For the true drug addict, there's no such thing as one as one is too many and a thousand never enough. You miss the taste? There are zero taste buds in human lungs, the place you'll instantly such the smoke. You're bored? Your brain is not addicted because it's bored, it's bored because smoking one pack-a-day consumed roughly 5 minutes per cigarette or 11.5 hours per week, and when quitting you notice all the extra time you wasted while the cigarette's 4,000 chemicals slowly destroyed your body. You "loved" smoking? Stop and think about the beauty of your pre-addiction mind, before nicotine took control, and going months and years without once craving nicotine. If you can no longer remember the beauty of that mind then what basis exists for honest comparison? None.

Increasingly, both health insurance and government treatment programs are showing greater willingness to compensate physicians for nicotine dependency recovery counseling. Just one or two wires running from an existing office computer to a less than $300 examining room LCD or DLP projector and a less than $50 speaker could instantly deliver your personalized slide show cessation presentation to your smoking patients, a presentation that can sequence automatically with your voice on recorded audio clips explaining exactly what they are seeing and why it's important. Imagine $350 and a few hours recording time actually helping save a patient's life.

What's stopping you? Need help putting it together? Here at Freedom you'll find hundreds of the most knowledgeable ex-smokers on earth and I'm sure any one of them would be delighted to assist. Knowledge truly is power, but only if put to work!

Breathe deep, hug hard, live long,

John (Gold x8)