Whole & Healthy

One of the most effective and most supportive ways to stop smoking is with the help and guidance of a smoking cessation clinic and the professionals who run it.

Let’s take a look at one such clinic and see what the stop smoking program is all about. This program is conducted by an expert physician who works with the American Cancer Society and an area hospital and has done so for nearly three decades. The stop smoking clinic has cured 4500 smokers through both individual and group counseling and an extensive after-clinic reinforcement process that includes a 24-hour hotline with live help. Once graduated from the first stop smoking clinic participants can return for future reinforcement clinics at no charge – and are encouraged to do so.

This clinic treats only those smokers who admit that smoking is a danger to their physical well being, that it is a threat to their status socially and that it is more expensive than it is worth.

This stop smoking clinic is $125. It consists of six sessions in the evening that extend over one two week time period. The 24-hour hot line as well as additional individual and group counseling is available both during and after the clinic. 

This stop smoking clinic is not touted as some quick smoking fix. They don’t keep records, give shots, or hypnotize. Smokers stop smoking the first day of the clinic and then they all support each other and are supported by the staff through the time period that is the worst for psychological and physiological withdrawal symptoms. 

While this clinic doesn’t claim to be – and is not – the least expensive, or the fastest, or the easiest, or the largest or even the most convenient of the stop smoking clinics. There is no guarantee of success and no refund if it doesn’t work. But it does work.

Smoking is recognized as an addiction and treated as such. This clinic is not about doing the work for the smoker. It is about teaching the smoker to do the stop smoking work for her or himself and then helping them stay off the cigarettes.

This clinic’s cold turkey stop smoking method is not for everyone. Clinicians believe that quitting smoking cold turkey is less painful and less difficult than any other stop smoking method. They believe it takes less time to stop smoking with the cold turkey method than with any other. The key, they believe, is in smokers’ realization that they are drug addicts just like heroine users, cocaine users and alcoholics. What the smokers at the clinic learn to understand is that their bodies have learned to need the nicotine and to crave it and that until it is finally completely out of their body they’ll continue to crave it.

As opposed to cold turkey, trying to stop smoking by cutting back on the number of cigarettes or replacing the nicotine with gum just prolongs the drug withdrawal. As long as some nicotine remains in the body the withdrawal will result in continued craving. Cold turkey, therefore, according to the specialists at this stop smoking clinic is the preferred method – the one that completely removes nicotine from the smoker’s body and therefore ultimately removes the nicotine cravings.