Does Nicotine Replacement Therapy Work?

By examining the various symptoms of withdrawal during the quitting process, one can figure out just whether or not nicotine replacement therapy works. It's definitely widely regarded as a good way of quitting smoking, though, considering that market penetration includes many convenience stores and pharmacies.

The general concept behind nicotine replacement therapy is that, while smoking, you give your body certain spikes of nicotine throughout the day. When you quit, your body metabolises the nicotine and its levels decrease in your bloodstream, causing withdrawal. By giving yourself small doses of nicotine (and decreasing them over time) you can wean your body off nicotine without feeling painful withdrawal symptoms.

What's the main problem with that? Nicotine has a half life of only two hours. That is, two hours after you've smoked a cigarette, nicotine levels in your blood have dropped by 50%. Most replacement therapy devices have you replacing nicotine for weeks, if not months. If levels drop off in your blood so quickly, why would you need a replacement for so long?

The answer is that you don't. Replacement therapy doesn't work, sadly. Their abysmal success rates reflect this, as way too many people rip their nicotine patches off or stop chewing their gum just to get back to smoking their cigarettes.

Why? Because cigarette addiction isn't a physical addiction, it's a mental one. We have trained our minds to believe that we need cigarettes during all times of the day, just to deal with the stresses of everyday life. To break free from the grasp of cigarettes, we need to break our mental ties between life events and smoking, instead of just band-aiding the problem with a nicotine patch.