Allen Carr's Easyway to Stop Smoking - Allen Carr [8]
They say that fact is stranger than fiction. I apologize to the makers of Sister Kenny for accusing them of using artistic license. I now know first-hand the difficulties she faced. Like Sister Kenny, I’m just a lone individual without the support of the big pharmaceutical companies or the major tobacco control charities such as the American Cancer Society, the Lung Association or the Heart and Stroke Foundation. Like her, I’m only famous because my approach works. Like her, the medical establishment has ignored the experience of millions of real people who have successfully quit using my simple, drug-free approach. Like Sister Kenny, I naively thought that once the establishment had seen the efficacy of my approach, they would not hesitate to adopt it. I could not have been more wrong.
You might draw 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 referrals to our centers from the medical profession than any other source, and surprisingly, more of our clients come from the medical profession than from any other.
In the early years, I was regarded by the medical profession as being a combination of charlatan and quack. However, in August 1997, I had the great honor to be invited to address the 10th World Conference on Tobacco or Health, hosted by the World Health Organization, in Beijing. I believe I am the first person with no medical qualifications to receive such an honor. The invitation itself was a measure of the progress we have made in establishing EASYWAY in the mainstream of stop smoking methods. However, I was disappointed to find that my lecture fell on deaf ears. The attendees (mainly public health policymakers and tobacco researchers) seemed able only to think in terms of drug-based approaches to quitting (e.g. treating nicotine addiction by prescribing nicotine). This was fortunate and convenient, as the conference itself was sponsored by the manufacturers of nicotine replacement products.
It occurred to me at that conference that almost none of the people in the field of trying to help smokers to quit had ever been smokers themselves. They may have known the molecular structure of nicotine and the impact of continuous exposure to the tars contained in tobacco on the human body, but none of them really understood smokers and smoking. As a result, they knew absolutely nothing about the reality of quitting.
As a consequence of this enormous gap in their knowledge, the medical establishment’s strategy was (and is to this day) to tell smokers what they already know: that they shouldn’t smoke because it is disgusting, anti-social, dangerous and expensive. Let’s face it, if this strategy worked, there wouldn’t be any smokers. Smokers don’t smoke for the reasons they shouldn’t smoke—every smoker knows that already and if it were going to make them quit, it would have done so years ago.
Even today, the medical profession seems adamant that nicotine replacement products or anti-depressants need to be used when smokers are trying to stop. While we are told that such treatments ‘can double your chances’ of quitting, the truth is that when all is said and done, such treatments have an 85–95% failure rate (depending on which research you read). Why doctors continue to prescribe treatments with such poor levels of success eludes me entirely, particularly when there is a fast, cheap alternative which has been proved effective many thousands of times over many years.
As I write this, the health authorities have just announced the launch of yet another media campaign aimed at discouraging children from starting to smoke by the use of frightening visual images. I recently appeared on TV along with a doctor representing Action on Smoking & Health (ASH), who had never smoked a day in her life and had never cured a single smoker. She categorically informed viewers that this campaign would discourage thousands of children from smoking and thereby