What is the best way to quit smoking? This very question highlights a regrettable lack of understanding in official circles about why smokers smoke in the first place, and how they can quit this abnormal behaviour. It needs to understood that you don’t need a way, method, or technique to quit smoking. You just need to quit [...]
Mental illness, or rather, what is called mental illness, is a serious matter. But what is it? To find the answer, or an answer, we can turn to the 1,000-page tome published by – who else? – the American Psychiatric Association. It’s called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The last (fifth) edition was published in [...]
Gentle reader. Observe the picture above. It’s to be found in various stock collections of photos, including one with the curious name of Unsplash where it’s available to be downloaded free of charge. It shows the face of a young man with a rather grim expression who appears to be dripping with sweat. [...]
Part 1. How to fail to quit smoking Quitting smoking is very hard. In fact, many former smokers say it’s the hardest thing they’ve ever done. However, if you follow the steps described below in the NHS 'Stoptober' yearly anti-smoking campaign and refrain from smoking for 28 days, you’ll be five times more likely not to fail in [...]
The problem of 'denormalising' smoking can be summed up like this: will people stop buying cigarettes because they’re no longer available, or will cigarettes no longer be on sale because no one wants to buy them? The picture shows a street sign near where I live in Tokyo outside a convenience store, announcing that they sell alcohol and [...]
Thanks to that fount of medical wisdom, The British Medical Journal (BMJ), we learn from the 23 November 2024 edition that ‘a new treatment option is proposed by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence to help people stop smoking.’ (At least they don’t say they’re going to roll out the new treatment.) This refers to cytisine, [...]
The UK General Medical Council (GMC), the doctors’ regulatory body, used to have a pithy aphorism to indicate what it does: ‘Guiding doctors, protecting patients.’ This was subsequently changed to ‘Guiding doctors. Ensuring good medical practice.’ I am sure doctors are sometimes in need of guidance, and doubtless there are occasions when patients may need to be protected [...]
The UK Government wants to enact legislation to ban the sale of single-use vapes from 1 June 2025, for the two good reasons stated on the gov.uk website: Making the sale of single-use vapes illegal, delivers on the Government’s commitment to act on this important issue, and kick-starts the push towards a circular economy and helps to curb [...]
Kawaii is a Japanese word meaning cute, sweet, pretty, etc. It’s often applied to babies, children, young girls, and – pet animals. And therein lies a problem. I have lived in Japan for four decades and regard it as a privilege to have been granted the right of permanent residency. After immigrating to this wonderful country, I have [...]
The way to solve the smoking problem is obvious I have asked this question before, but no one seems prepared to answer it. If tobacco is merely to be controlled rather than abolished, this implies there are some circumstances where tobacco use is legitimate or acceptable. And what, pray, are these? Furthermore, to talk of tobacco harm reduction is [...]