- Stop Smoking Medications -
Should You Take Pills to Stop Smoking Cigarettes?

Stop smoking medications are a new market share for drug companies. The medications are being sold as harm reduction.

The message is that anything that helps a person to stop smoking cigarettes is desirable because it helps to avoid the many costly and harmful health effects of smoking cigarettes.

But is it really harmless when you reach for pills to stop smoking?

Medication to stop smoking comes with risks just like any other drug. The introduction of chemicals foreign to the human body is unpredictable and unreliable. No matter how many research clinical trials are done nobody can predict how you will react and you will not know until you take the drug.

There is really no such thing as a risk free drug and side effects of prescription drugs are really just part of the overall effect of the drug and your specific reaction to it.

Adverse drug reactions are the serious side effects that are accepted to be unpredictable because of individual variations in how drugs are used and prescribed.

If you use the drug EXACTLY as it was used in a clinical trial and if the drug was prescribed to you under the EXACT same conditions as the study participants, and you have the EXACT same body chemistry as most of the study participants, then the probabilities from the study results would hold true.

However, this degree of precision is seldom the case in real life prescribing, by real life doctors in everyday practice.

When your doctor writes a prescription for stop smoking medication he or she should review the effects of the drug and the possible risks of taking it including all the side effects. The pharmacist should do the same when the drug is dispensed.

You will hear or read numbers and percentages of side effects of any prescription drugs you get and probably dismiss them because your doctor prescribed the medication so you assume it is safe.

This is the wrong assumption.

You and your doctor only know about side effects of prescription drugs if they are reported and the facts are that adverse drug reactions are severely under reported.

Do Stop Smoking Medications Really Work?

Nearly all research results point to the efficacy of stop smoking medications such as varenicline and the drug Zyban (buproprion), and even nicotine replacement therapy in helping people to quit smoking. In other words they work better than a placebo.

But remember that even the people who took placebos in these trials had some success to stop smoking cigarettes; it is just that the success rate for the people who were taking the stop smoking medications was higher.

This proves two things:

1. people can stop smoking without taking medication and...


2. the medication helped more people be successful with quitting than the placebo.

However, even if the evidence shows that stop smoking drugs increase the success rate of people who are trying to quit cigarette smoking, the results fall a bit short in being stupendous at keeping people off cigarettes.

Despite the under reporting of adverse side effects for stop smoking medications (and side effects of all prescription drugs) you have to work with the information you have.

You are the only person who can make the decision to take pills to stop smoking based on this information.

Go back to Stop Smoking Pills - Using Chantix and the Drug Zyban
to Control Nicotine Withdrawal Symptoms

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The Real Dangers of Cigarette Smoking