Blog Against Cancer

Stop Smoking - Introduction

I was talking to my wife. She thought that I had flipped. Understand able if you consider that she had watched me fail on numerous attempts to quit. The most recent had been two years previously. I’d actually survived six months of sheer purgatory before I finally succumbed and lit a cigarette. I’m not ashamed to admit that I cried like a baby. I was crying because I knew that I was condemned to he a smoker for life. I’d put so much effort into that attempt and suffered so much misery that I knew I would never have the strength to go through that ordeal again. I’m not a violent man, but if some patronizing non-smoker had been stupid enough at that moment to suggest to me that all smokers can find it easy to quit, immediately and permanently, I would not have been responsible for my actions.

However, I’m convinced that any jury in the world, comprised of smokers only, would have pardoned me on the grounds of justifiable homicide.
Perhaps you too find it impossible to believe that any smoker can find it easy to quit. If so, I beg you not to cast this book into the rubbish bin. Please trus t me. I assure you that even you can find it easy to quit.
Anyway, there I was two years later, having just extinguished what I knew would be my final cigarette, not only telling my wife that I was already a non-smoker, but that I was going to cure the rest of the world. I must admit that at the time I found her skepticism somewhat irritating. However, in no way did it diminish my feeling of exaltation, 1 suppose that my exhilaration in knowing that I was already a happy non-smoker distorted my perspective somewhat. With the benefit of hindsight, I can sympathize with her attitude, I now understand why Joyce and my close friends and relatives thought I was a candidate for the funny farm.

As I look back on my life, it seems that my whole existence has been a preparation for solving the smoking problem. Even those hateful years of training and practicing as a chartered accountant were
invaluable in helping me to unravel the mysteries of the smoking trap. They say you can’t fool all the people all of the time, but I believe the tobacco companies have done just that for years. I also believe that I am the first to really understand the smoking trap. If I appear to be arrogant, let me hasten to add that it was no credit to me, just the circumstances of my life. The momentous day was 15 July 1983, I didn’t escape from Colditz, but I imagine those who did felt the same sense of relief and exhilaration as I did when I extinguished that final cigarette. I realized 1 had discovered something that every smoker was praying for: an easy way to stop smoking.
After testing out the method on smoking friends and relatives, I gave up accountancy and became a full-time consultant, helping other smokers to get free. I wrote the first edition of this book in 1985. One of my failures, the man I describe in chapter 25, was the inspiration. He visited me twice, and we were both reduced to tears on each occasion. He was so agitated that I couldn’t get him to relax enough to absorb what I was saying. I hoped that if I wrote it all down, he could read it in his own good time, as many times as he wanted to, and this would help him to absorb the message.
I was in no doubt that EASYWAY would work just as effectively for other smokers as it had for me. However, when I contemplated putting the method into book form, I was apprehensive. I did my own
market research.

The comments were not very encouraging:
‘How can a book help me to quit? What I need is willpower!’
‘How can a book avoid the terrible withdrawal pangs?’
In addition to these pessimistic comments, I had my own doubts. Often at the clinics it became obvious that a client had misunderstood an important point that I was making. I was able to correct the situation. But how would a book be able to do that? I remembered well the times when I studied to qualify as an accountant, when I didn’t understand or agree with a particular point in a book, the frustration because you couldn’t ask the book to explain, I was also well aware, particularly in these days of television and videos, that many people arc not accustomed to reading. Added to all these factors, I had one doubt that overrode all the rest. I wasn’t a writer and was very conscious of my limitations in this respect. I was confident that I could sit down face to face with a smoker and convince that smoker how much more enjoyable social occasions to regard it as their failure. We regard it as our failure, we failed to convince those smokers just how easy and enjoyable it is to quit.
I dedicated the first edition to the smokers that I had failed to cure. That failure rate was based on the money-hack guarantee that we give at our clinics. The average current failure rate of our clinics world-wide is under 5 per cent. That means a success rate of over 95 per cent, Although I was aware that I had discovered something marvelous, I never in my wildest dreams expected to achieve such rates. You might well argue that if I genuinely believed that I would cure the world of smoking, I must have expected to achieve 100 per cent. No, I never ever expected to achieve 100 per cent. Snuff-taking was the previous most popular form of nicotine addiction until it became antisocial and died. However, there are still a few weirdoes that continue to take snuff and probably, there always will be. Amazingly, the Houses of Parliament are one of the last bastions of snuff-taking. I suppose this is not so surprising when you think about it, politicians are generally about a hundred years behind the times. So there will always be a few weirdoes that will continue to smoke, I certainly never expected to have to cure every smoker personally.

What I thought would happen was that once I had explained the mysteries of the smoking trap and dispelled such illusions as:
* Smokers enjoy smoking
* Smokers choose to smoke
* Smoking relieves boredom & stress
* Smoking aids concentration and relaxation
* Smoking is a habit
* It takes willpower to quit
* Once a smoker always a smoker
* Telling smokers that it kills them helps them to quit
* Substitutes, particularly nicotine replacement, helps smokers to quit, in particular, when I had dispelled the illusion that it is difficult to quit and that you have to go through a transitional period of misery in order to do so, I naively thought that the rest of the world would also see the light and adopt my method.

I thought my chief antagonist would be the tobacco industry. Amazingly, my chief stumbling blocks were the very institutions that I thought would be my greatest allies: the media, the Government, organizations like ASH, QUIT and the established medical profession. You’ve probably seen the film Sister Kenny. In case you haven’t, it was about the time when infantile paralysis or polio was the scourge of our children. I vividly remember that the words engendered the same fear in me as the word cancer does today. The effect of polio was not only to paralyze the legs and arms but to distort the limbs. The established medical treatment was to put those limbs in irons and thus prevent the distortion. The result was paralysis for life. Sister Kenny believed the irons inhibited recovery and proved a thousand times over that the muscles could be re-educated so that the child could walk again. However, Sister Kenny wasn’t a doctor, she was merely a nurse. How dare she dabble in a province that was confined to qualified doctors? It didn’t seem to matter that Sister Kenny had found the solution to the problem and had proved her solution to be effective. The children that were treated by Sister Kenny knew she was right, so did their parents, yet the established medical profession not only refused to adopt her methods but actually prevented her from practicing. It took Sister Kenny twenty years before the medical profession would accept the obvious.

I first saw that film years before I discovered EASYWAY, The film was very interesting and no doubt there was an element of truth. However, it was equally obvious that Hollywood had used a large portion of poetic license. Sister Kenny couldn’t possibly have dis covered something that the combined knowledge of medical science had failed to discover. Surely the established medical specialists weren’t the dinosaurs they were being portrayed as? How could it possibly have taken them twenty years to accept the facts that were staring them in the face? They say that fact is stranger than fiction, I apologize for accusing the makers of Sister Kenny for using poetic license. Even in this so-called enlightened age of modern communications, after fourteen years, even having access to modern communications, I’ve failed to get my message across. Oh, I’ve proved my point, the only reason that you are reading this hook is because another ex-smoker has recommended it to you. Remember, I don’t have the massive financial power of institutions like the BMA, ASH or QUIT. Like Sister Kenny, I’m a lone individual. Like her. I’m only famous because rny system works. I’m already regarded as the number-one guru on helping smokers to quit. Like Sister Kenny, I’ve proved my point. But Sister Kenny proved her point. What good did that do if the rest of the world was still adopting procedures which were the direct opposite to what they should be?

The last sentence of this book is identical to that in the original manuscript:

There is a wind of change in society, A snowball has started that I hope this book will help turn into an avalanche. From my remarks above, you might have drawn the conclusion that I am no respecter of the medical profession. Nothing could be further from the truth. One of my sons is a doctor and I know of no finer profession. Indeed we receive more recommendations to our clinics from doctors than from any other source, and surprisingly, more of our clients come from the medical profession than any other single profession. In the early years, I was generally regarded by the doctors as being somewhere between a charlatan and a quack. In August 1997, I had the great honor to be invited to lecture to the 10th World Conference on Tobacco or Health held in Beijing. I believe that I am the first nonqualified doctor to receive such an honor. The invitation itself is a measure of the progress that I have made.

However, I might just as well have been lecturing to a brick wall Since the nicotine chewing-gum and the patch have failed to cure the problem, smokers themselves appear to have accepted that you don’t get cured from addiction to a drug by prescribing the same drug. It’s equivalent to saying to a heroin addict: don’t smoke heroin, smoking is dangerous, try injecting it into your vein (don’t try this with nicotine, it will kill you instantly). Because the medical profession and the media haven’t a clue about helping smokers to quit, they concentrate on telling smokers what they already know: smoking is unhealthy, it’s filthy and disgusting, it’s antisocial and expensive. It never seems to occur to them that smokers do not smoke for the reasons that they shouldn’t smoke. The real problem is to remove the reasons that they do smoke.
On national no-smoking days, the medical experts say something like: This is the day that every smoker tries to quit!’ Every smoker knows that it is the one day in the year that most smokers will smoke twice as many as they usually do and twice as blatantly, because smokers don’t like being told what to do, particularly by people who dismiss smokers as mere idiots and don’t understand why they smoke.
Because they don’t completely understand smokers themselves or how to make it easy for smokers to quit, their attitude is ‘Try this method. If it doesn’t work try another: Can you imagine if there were ten different ways of treating appendicitis? Nine of them cured 10 per cent of the patients, which means they killed 90 per cent of them and the tenth way cured 95 per cent. Imagine that knowledge of the tenth method had been available for over fourteen years, but the vast majority of the medical profession was still recommending the other nine. One of the doctors at the conference raised a very pertinent point that hadn’t occurred to me. He pointed out that doctors might well find themselves liable to a legal action for malpractice, by not advising their patients of the best way to quit smoking. Ironically he was a great advocate of nicotine replacement therapy (nicotine gums, patches, etc.), I try hard not to be vindictive, but I hope he becomes the first victim of his suggestion.

As I write, the Government has just wasted £2.5 million on a shook TV campaign trying to persuade youngsters not to get hooked. They might just as well have wasted it on trying to persuade them that motorbikes can kill you. Do they not realize that youngsters know that one cigarette won’t kill them and that no youngster ever expects to get hooked? The link between smoking and lung cancer has been established for over forty years. Yet more youngsters are becoming hooked nowadays than ever before. Youngsters don’t need to watch smoking horrors on TV. Smokers tend to avoid such, programmes anyway. Practically every youngster in the country has witnessed the actual devastation that smoking causes within their own family. I watched my father and my sister destroyed by the weed; that didn’t prevent me from falling into the trap.
I appeared on a national TV programme with a doctor from Ash who had never smoked in her life and had never cured a single smoker, categorically informing the nation how this campaign would prevent youngsters from becoming hooked. If only the government had had the common sense to give that £2.5 million to me, I could have financed a campaign that would have guaranteed the death of nicotine addiction within a few years. I truly believe that the snowball has become a football. But after fourteen years that is still a spit in the ocean. I’m grateful to the thousands of ex-smokers who have visited my clinics, read my books, watched my videos and recommended EASYWAY to their friends, relatives and anyone who will listen to them, and 1 pray that you continue to do so. However, the snowball won’t become an avalanche until the medical profession and the media stop recommending methods that make it harder to quit and accept that EASYWAY is not just another method: BUT THE ONLY

SENSIBLE METHOD TO USE!

I don’t expect you to believe me at this stage, but by the time you have finished the book, you will  understand. Even the comparatively few failures that we have say something like: ‘I haven’t succeeded yet, but your way is better than any I know.’ If when you finish the book, you feel that you owe me a debt of gratitude, you can more than repay that debt. Not just by recommending EASYWAY to your friends, but whenever you see a TV or radio programme, or read a newspaper article advocating some other method, write to them or phone them asking why they aren’t advocating EASYWAY. That will start the avalanche and if I live to
witness it, I will die a happy man.
This third edition of EASYWAY is to give you the state of the art technology on just how easy and enjoyable it is to quit smoking. Do you have a feeling of doom and gloom? Forget it. I’ve achieved some marvelous things in my life. By far the greatest was to escape from the slavery of nicotine addiction. I escaped over fourteen years ago and still cannot get over the joy of being free. There is no need to feel depressed, nothing bad is happening, on the contrary, you are about to achieve something that every smoker on the planet would love to achieve : TO BE FREE!