Ok, he heard it from a doctor somewhere that if smoking cessation could not be attained by regular drugs and stop smoking treatments in the clinic, the only other possible route was through alternate medicine. He offered my brother hypnotism as a way to quit smoking, but my brother declined; and then he suggested smoking cessation by acupuncture, but Harry has always had a thing about needles. Finally, the physician said he was not sure about how effective this other treatment for quitting smoking might be, but could my brother try seeing a dietician about it?

My brother thought it had to be a joke; even I thought it had to be a joke. Except that we had nothing to lose – every other attempt to break the smoking habit had failed for Harry, and he was desperate – so we decided to give it a shot anyway. We called the number on the card and booked an appointment. And we did learn, boy did we learn!

As it turns out, body alkalinity has an effect on nicotine cravings. When your system has a low alkaline level, you will find it harder to resist the urge to smoke, and end up being stuck on the cigarette. The dietician ordered us on something of an acidosis diet with a rigid regimen of proteins and fat, while starch and sugar were to be greatly reduced. We also had to take a magnesium diet that consisted of valerian and wild lettuce. The dietician warned us to be careful on the diet; we could stay on it for only two weeks at a time before we absolutely had to get back to eating normally. He said the body could only take that much acidity or alkalinity at once without shutting down.

“Didn’t think it would work”, I must confess, I was the one who told Harry he should ditch the diet; but he wanted to be like me so much that he did it. So I moved in with him for a couple of months and joined him on the stop smoking program. “Didn’t think it would work”, I say again, but he was determined to stay on the diet; and so he did. Harry also made conscious effort to not buy any packs of cigarette for as long as he could help it. It was four months later before we realized that Harry had not smoked since the first month.

Increased alkalinity in the body system equals reduced thirst or yearning for nicotine, is what the dietician said, but I’ll never know if it was not the fact that we were together, our focus on sticking to the tenements of the diet, or simply willpower that was eventually able to help Harry stop smoking. We do know though that we stayed with the diet for another six months before I first ditched it, and then Harry did. He never smoked again since.

There are many ways to stop smoking; for Harry, it turns out it was the diet that helped.

I was there too, a while back; telling the whole world around me that I was trying to quit smoking. And I would stay clean for two days, and then I would be back worse than before; and then I would stay clean for another entire day, feeling really good about myself, but I would be back again even worse. I continued to decline that way for a very long time – I am talking about five years here – before I finally consented to the fact that I needed medical assistance to deal with the addiction. You are going to get there too, you know – that point where you realize that you have to get medical assistance to quit smoking. And when you do, you might just be able to break free from the bad smoking habit eventually.

For me, it was the stop smoking pills that eventually worked. I sincerely gave it my best shot; I went rogue with stop smoking literature and a host of other products that help you quit smoking; I even tried counseling and therapy; but smoking cessation for me was a phantom thought until my doctor introduced me to the pills. Don’t ask me; I’ll never know why nothing else helped. I suppose you could say ‘different strokes work for different folks,’ and you wouldn’t be too far off of the mark. All I can say is that once I started with the smoking cessation medications, I found my way back to stability.

I started out with Zyban, a long time antidepressant medication that has always been used in treating patients who had trouble dealing with the withdrawal symptoms from nicotine. Zyban is the brand name for the substance bupropin; it worked perfectly for two days before the doctor caught me trying to steal out of the stop smoking center to grab a cigarette. At that point, he had to introduce me to the rest of a wide range of antidepressant medications that worked by ‘regulating the levels of serotonin and other neurotransmitters’ in my brain, like I had a clue what he was talking about.

I didn’t. All that mattered to me was that he stopped that yawning craving for nicotine that had me in physical pain, headaches, and nausea for the whole day. This time around, I was given something called venlafaxine, or Effexor, as the mental health professional preferred to refer to it. He said it would tackle my craving. It did; and finally this time I was able to stay sober for a long time. That was three years ago, I have been clean from cigarettes and nicotine all of that time.

I will not presume to tell you it was a walk in the park because sometimes I still walk past a smoker and yearn for a drag, but when I think of the damage I had done to my lungs prior to quitting smoking, I remind myself that it isn’t worth it. The stop smoking group that I am a part of also helps in no little way, so I suppose I am in luck. But the best stop smoking advice I can give anyone is never to have started smoking at all in the first place.

So you are trying to quit? Good for you, except that you have not quite succeeded in breaking your smoking habit because each time you abstain, you come back stronger than before after less than a month. Well, it’s probably because you have not yet tried all the options that are open to you. I mean, there is the nicotine gum, there is laser treatment, there are drugs that the doctor can prescribe for you to help you break the habit, and then there is good old group psychotherapy.

Personally, I have deference for the nicotine patch because of its convenience with relation to most of these other techniques to help break the smoking habit. The nicotine patch is a nicotine replacement product like several others. It is a transdermal piece of material that is applied on various parts of the body of people trying to stop smoking. Some people attach it to the back of their necks, some to their stomach, and most quit smoking patients apply the ’sticker’ to their upper arms because of the ease with which they can reach it.

Throughout the day, the patch continually releases a small amount of nicotine into your body through your skin to your bloodstream. The result of this is to simulate the effect of smoking in your system so that you ‘feel’ the satisfaction of having smoked a few cigarettes without ever actually touching any. These small nicotine-containing adhesive discs are not even very expensive to come about, and you don’t need a prescription to get one. It is easy on the pocket, and it contains just enough nicotine to fool your system into believing that you have smoked.

Over time, you will need nicotine patches with smaller and smaller doses of the substance until your craving finally ends. The nicotine inhaler works in a similar manner, but it is rather conspicuous; and the nicotine nasal spray is a bit on the high-priced side, also requiring a prescription. On a busy day, you may not have a lot of time to be lugging a spray can around with you or going out to get the chewing gums. When the day ends, your craving could have built up to a head that you cannot resist. But if you had a patch on the whole time, you may not be even aware that the longing was being drawn from your body. This is why I think the nicotine patch is just perfect for real people trying to quit smoking.

However, the best way to stop smoking really has been to merge as many stop smoking methods as you can manage into a single effort. Some people may call it overkill, but combined with your determination and willpower you, are totally guaranteed to be able to break the habit better that way” and stay clean too.

· Books – Ever since the Surgeon General’s 1960s release of the harmful effects of smoking on the human body, the number of smokers in the United States had started to decline rapidly. The decline is still ongoing and several health professionals and practitioners are writing and publishing all kinds of literature that will reveal the awful truths of nicotine and its four thousand some cohort chemicals that inhabit tobacco. You should get your hands on a few for incentive as you try to stop smoking.

· Free Online & Internet Products – There are perhaps a thousand websites online that peddle various products that can help with your efforts to stop smoking. There is no way you can be at a loss for free software downloads that provide information about things to do and how to do them when you are trying to stop smoking. There are mp3s with songs and lectures from renowned world figures that will come in more than handy when you find yourself on a rough patch in your route. Lastly, there are ebooks that you can download as well to read at your convenience.

· Nicotine Replacement Products – If you live in the United States, you must have heard about the nicotine gum, the nicotine nasal spray, and the nicotine patch. These are just a few of the plentiful nicotine replacement products that have the potential to wean you off of the smoking habit. You can put the patch on your skin – usually your upper arm – and it will release trace amounts of nicotine into your bloodstream via your skin, until you feel like you have actually taken tobacco. The spray and the gum also work in the same way, making you feel you have had your fix of the substance until gradually the craving leaves.

· Pills and Drugs – There are a few medications that doctors may prescribe to you as you try to stop smoking. Most of the have antihistamine and antidepressant qualities, and also side effects, that cause physicians to recommend them only sparingly. Zyban and Chintax are a couple of such pills that are administered orally, while scopolamine and atarax are taken intravenously. They help you it manage the severe withdrawal symptoms that you are bound to experience the first or second day that you try to stay away from tobacco and nicotine.

The above are only a few of the products that can help you stop smoking. If you hit the Internet any day, you will find several more, most of them free. If you are bent on smoking cessation, you should be right at home with any number of them that you can get your hands on. Couple them with determination therapy from a physician, and a support group, and you may never again have to worry if you may relapse, because you won’t.

Talk to your doctor anytime, and they will tell you that your best shot at quitting smoking and staying that way is to take the SMART shot. If you haven’t heard of it by now, you need to do some self-examination, especially if you have been trying time and again to quit smoking and you have not quite made it.

The reason why a lot of people find it hard to break the smoking habit is because they are addicted to the nicotine in tobacco. Nicotine enters your bloodstream through your lungs, and from there it travels to your heart. From your heart, it is pumped along with the rest of your red blood cells into your brain where it damages the cells that help you generate chemicals for satisfaction. As a result, you want more, and more, and more, until you really cannot get enough.

Nicotine prompts the reuptake of the neurotransmitter serotonin, resulting in mood changes and a feeling of relaxation that is not quite real, and that is never enough. What the SMART shot does is that it inhibits the reuptake of this and other neurotransmitters in your system so that your craving for the substance lessens appreciably.

SMART is the Scopolamine Medicated Anticholinergic Receptor Treatment, which comprises of the substances scopolamine and the antihistamine atarax. Not to be taken alone, you have to remain on the shot for a minimum of two weeks, during which time you must also be on the scopolamine patch for best effects. The shot is applied to your neck or to your buttocks, blocking your brain nicotine receptors and easing the physical withdrawal symptoms of the substance.

Before you embark on such treatment, you should have an extensive chat with your doctor because of the potential side effects of the shots. On its own, atarax is used in the treatment of allergies, itches and irritations. It is a weak painkiller and it also helps to reduce nausea. However, it side effects are deep sleep, dizziness, low blood pressure, dehydration and constipation. Scopolamine on the other hand is mostly employed in the treatment of motion sickness and intestinal cramping. It also causes dehydration and irritation as side effects, as well as sensitivity to light and difficulty urinating.

However, together and applied in the intravenous shot form, they have the soothing effect that can wean you off of nicotine in a way most other stop smoking treatments can’t. As a result, you should seriously consider taking the treatment, especially if your doctor approves. If they don’t you will do yourself a favor and stick with any other stop smoking program they recommend to you. The doctor does know better, don’t they?

Let’s try the Internet for a moment, shall we? Simple to access, you can use your online search engine to locate any of the countless quit smoking aids on the Internet. You will perhaps get about a thousand of them, maybe even twice that. Sincerely speaking even a single one of these aids could do the trick for you, but since statistics show that using two or more quit smoking aids at once has a higher success rate than using a single one, perhaps you should not be using a single aid then, but two or three of them at the same time. I still maintain that you don’t need as many as four. Why, there’s only one of you!

You can begin with the smoking cessation mp3 downloads. They have everything you need to learn about why and how you need to stop smoking, and how you can actually make it happen. There are songs by promoters of the movement against tobacco smoking, statements and lectures by former addicts, statistical facts from all kinds of research professionals in the field” everything that you need to encourage you in your bid to stop throwing your life away. Really, you couldn’t go wrong with the mp3s.

You can migrate from the mp3s and join support groups on the Internet at no cost to you. You may not have thought of it before but sincerely, you can draw strength with which to abstain from the cigarettes by learning what other people like yourself have been through as they struggled to kick the habit. Former smokers who are interested in helping others who are still in the habit, and people who actually still smoke and are trying to quit, and professionals, doctors and psychiatrists, who are there just to lend a professional angle to the therapy; they all make the online quit smoking support groups a tremendous success. You definitely know that that you can afford to be one of those success stories.

Then there are drugs and medications that you actually could come by on the Internet. You can find free reviews on them by professional and regulatory bodies to inform you on which ones are good for you and how precisely they work. You also can get free online consultation with other psychiatrists who have been in the business for years and have a lot of experience treating people with the habit and helping them become non-smokers. I mean, what could be better than your own personal online doctor, totally free?

The Internet is vast, and with it is a vast resource of helps, aids, and assists that can make your smoking cessation program a success story. So you have been trying for three years to quit and you still haven’t been able to? Take it from me; you haven’t tried hard enough if you haven’t tried all the free online aids that can actually help you break the smoking habit” Free!