Quit Smoking Injection

A quit smoking injection or shot has a lot of appeal. I mean you immediately think that with one shot you’re done! Smoking injections work, but not quite that easily. And, like all other ways to quit smoking, these shots do not work all of the time.

What Is A Quit Smoking Injection?

Doctors and clinics usually use a combination of drugs in their injection based therapies. Some of these drugs are atropine, scopolamine, and a drug called Atarax.

Atropine and scopolamine are used together, so are Atarax and scopolamine.

How Are These Injections Administered?

The patient usually starts off with three or so shots of the combination of drugs used. Unfortunately, the idea that you can walk into a clinic, get and shot, and walk out cured of your nicotine addiction is not quit true.

What really happens is you get the initial shots, then come back for more shots or continue to take these drugs orally for the next two or so weeks.

How Do These Injections Work?

When you smoke, nicotine molecules pass from your mouth and lungs into your blood stream. From the blood stream they are carried to your brain, where they attach themselves to receptors. This causes a chemical change in the brain which results in that euphoric feeling you get from smoking.

Unfortunately, the brain becomes dependent on these nicotine molecules attaching themselves. The result of this dependence is addiction to nicotine.

By blocking these receptors, smoking injections effectively keep the brain from getting its nicotine. You don’t go through withdrawal symptoms because the injections are doing for you what the nicotine did for you. Thus you can wean yourself off of nicotine rapidly.

Are Quit Smoking Injections Effective?

Doctors and clinics who administer these injections report from 20% success to over 80% success. You have to watch out when comparing numbers like these, though. For one thing, you don’t know what the clinic means by the word “quit”. Do they mean quit for three weeks, a month, six months? Do they count the smokers who dropped out of the program?

I suspect the actual quit rate is at the lower end of that 20 to 80% spectrum. There are so many factors at play in quitting smoking.

Conclusion

Quit smoking injections are something you might definitely want to talk to your primary care physician about. They are not for everyone. If you have chronic medical problems, take certain medications, or are pregnant, then you shouldn’t use this therapy.

They do seem to increase your chances of quitting, though. So, this is definitely worth looking into.

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