Psychiatrist Recommends Electronic Cigarettes as Smoking Cessation Aid for People Who Fail to Quit by Other Means
Doctor Keith Ablow, a renowned psychiatrist and a writer for the FOX News Medical Section has recently posted an article in which he acknowledges electronic cigarettes as an effective smoking cessation aid for patients who can’t quit cold turkey.
“Since many of my patients have reported using electronic cigarettes to successfully stop smoking, I now recommend the devices to anyone who has tried to quit smoking cold turkey and failed. And I think it is time that other doctors do, too,” Dr. Ablow wrote in his column. This kind of positive outlook on e-cigarettes is very rare in a time when most doctors and the media seem hellbent on putting them in a bad light. Not to mention the article is published on one of the biggest news networks in the world. It’s quite refreshing to see someone outside the vaping community say some positive things about this revolutionary device, especially someone with a notable medical background.
In his article on FOX, Keith Ablow argues that the reason why electronic cigarettes work so much better for his patients that common Nicotine Replacement Therapies (NRTs) like patches and gum, is because the simulate the act of smoking, but not well enough to become another addiction. He makes an analogy to food addiction, where someone would eat something low in calories to fill them up and prevent bingeing on sweets and fatty foods, but is then easily forgotten, because it’s not that satisfying. I’m not sure I agree with him on this, as apart from the mental addiction from the old habit, we are still talking about a very addictive substance. Of course, it’s already been proven nicotine is just a stimulant, like caffeine, that can’t really be blamed for all the harm caused by smoking tobacco cigarettes.
Another important thing Ablow mentions in his article is that the one thing no one seems to argue about is that electronic cigarettes are not nearly as dangerous as smoking real cigarettes. This is what e-cigarette supporters have been saying for years. Time will tell if they are completely safe, but for the time being, I think we can all agree they are better than analogs. Sadly, I have to disagree with Dr. Ablow again, there are those who would argue e-cigs are just as bad, if not worse that tobacco cigarettes, which is just mind-boggling.
“Given my experiences and those of numerous clinicians I have spoken with, it would seem to be a good time to conduct large scale clinical trials in which patients who smoke are given electronic cigarettes by their doctors, encouraged to use them and then quizzed on their use of real tobacco weeks and months and years later,” Keith Ablow suggests. It would seem like the normal thing to do, but so far everyone has just tried to slander electronic cigarettes based on assumptions and unfounded claims, instead of hard evidence. We’ve had some small scale tests, like the recent one that showed electronic cigarettes use reduces smoking in schizophrenia patients, but until we have some official large scale studies conducted by unbiased doctors and scientists, we’re going to have a never-ending debate.
Source: FOX News
