Allen Carr's Easyway to Stop Smoking - Allen Carr [7]
After approximately a year of running stop smoking seminars, I thought I had learned everything there was to know about helping smokers to quit. Amazingly, I still learn something new practically every day. This fact caused me some concern when I was asked to review the original edition and write this brand new US one. I feared that I would have to amend or retract practically everything I had written.
Again, I needn’t have worried. The basic principles of EASYWAY are as sound today as when I first committed them to paper in 1985. The beautiful truth is:
IT IS EASY TO STOP
That is a fact. My only challenge is to convince smokers that it’s true.
At the seminars we try to achieve perfection. Every single failure hurts us deeply because we know that every smoker can find it easy to quit. When smokers fail, they tend to blame themselves but we regard the failure as ours—we failed to convince those smokers just how easy and enjoyable it is to quit and to stay quit. This is why we offer a money-back guarantee to all our seminar attendees. While initially this money-back concept nearly gave my bank manager a heart attack, over the past twenty-five years his fear has proved to be unfounded as fewer than 5% of attendees make a claim for a refund.
When I started to conduct seminars to help smokers, I originally believed that my biggest enemy would be the tobacco industry. While it is true that they have been less than friendly, amazingly my main obstacles have in fact been the very institutions that I thought would be my greatest allies: the media, the Government and the tobacco control establishment.
I’m a fan of old movies and I recently watched the marvelous Sister Kenny. It’s a somewhat obscure film from the 1940s starring Rosalind Russell. It tells the astonishing (and true) story of Sister Elizabeth Kenny, an Australian nurse who worked with children suffering from infantile paralysis or polio. During the first half of the twentieth century until the discovery of a vaccine in 1954, the word ‘polio’ engendered the same fear as the word ‘cancer’ does today. The effect of polio was not only to paralyze the legs and arms but also to distort them. The established medical treatment of the time was to put the limbs in irons in an attempt to prevent the distortion. The result was paralysis for life.
Sister Kenny rightly believed that the irons actually prevented recovery and demonstrated a thousand times over at her clinic that the muscles could be retrained to enable children to once again walk. However, Sister Kenny wasn’t a doctor, she was merely a nurse. How dare she dabble in an area that was confined to qualified doctors? It didn’t seem to matter that Sister Kenny had found a solution to the problem and had proved her solution to be effective. The children treated by Sister Kenny knew she was right; so did their parents. Yet the Australian medical establishment not only refused to adopt her methods but also banned her from practicing. In 1940, after thirty years of rejection, Sister Kenny moved to the U.S. where she was eventually viewed as a miracle worker. In 1952 she was voted America’s Most Admired Woman.
I first saw that film years before I discovered EASYWAY. It is a wonderful and entertaining story, but surely Hollywood had used a large slice of artistic license for dramatic effect? Sister Kenny couldn’t possibly have discovered something that the medical establishment had failed to. Surely the medical profession weren’t the dinosaurs they were being portrayed as? How could it possibly have taken these intelligent, devoted men and women of science twenty years to accept the