What Happened At the Lung Cancer Screening Sites

A study published in 2015 by James Ostroff et al., described what happened at 93 lung

 cancer screening sites across the US. The main question investigated by this survey was

 whether these sites had any influence on follow up resource utilization among its clients.

 

Most sites reported that, at the initial visit, patients were routinely asked about their current

 smoking status (98.9%) and current smokers were advised to quit (91.4%). Fewer (57%)

 sites provided cessation counseling or referred  smokers to a quitline (60.2%) and even

 fewer (36.6%) routinely recommended cessation medications.    

   

DISAPPOINTING FOLLOW-UP FINDINGS

During follow-up screening visits, respondents reported less attention to smoking cessation

 advice and treatment. Lack of patient motivation and resistance to cessation advice and

 treatment, lack of staff training, and lack of reimbursement were the most frequently cited

 barriers for delivering smoking cessation treatment.

 

The study concluded by stating that greater attention to identifying and addressing barriers

 for tobacco treatment delivery is needed in order to maximize the potential benefit of

 integrating smoking cessation into lung cancer screening protocols.

http://ntr.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2015/09/18/ntr.ntv177.abstract

 

Earlier in 2007, another lung cancer screening site reported these findings:

“Nicotine replacement therapy and free counseling were the cessation methods that were of

 most interest, and fear of  lung health problems was the most frequently endorsed

 motivation for quitting smoking. Regarding readiness to stop  smoking, approximately 20%

 were ready to stop in the next 30 days, 45% were ready to stop in the next 6 months,  while

 35% were not thinking of stopping.

 

At the follow-up, 7% of current smokers at baseline reported abstinence, and 4% of former

 smokers at baseline  reported having relapsed. The findings differed across the two samples

 when considering the readiness to quit  outcome. At the 1-month follow-up of the NLST

 sample, participants became more ready to stop smoking (p<.05).  Screening result did not

 moderate this finding.

 

In the LSS sample, among younger participants (<or=64), an abnormal screening result was

 significantly associated  with becoming more ready to stop smoking, whereas a normal

 result was associated with becoming less ready to stop  smoking (p=.02).”

CONCLUSIONS TO 2007 STUDY:

The report stated in conclusion that: “The current findings demonstrated the feasibility of

 enrolling lung screening  participants into a smoking-related research study, as well as the

 high level of interest in stopping smoking and in  smoking cessation interventions. These

 data indicate that lung cancer screening may serve as a teachable moment for  smoking

 cessation, and suggest that a smoking cessation trial within the context of lung cancer

 screening is feasible.”

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17196298

 

So in general, I at Beautiful Quitters would say that these screening sites could do better in

 capturing interest in  quitting. Much more work still needs to be done.

Please contact me at Averayugen@mail.com if you could use some personal phone coaching

 on a donations-only  basis.

So What About These Vapes?

RECOVERY FROM NICOTINE DEPENDENCE?

The practice of vaping has been around for a while but the studies are slow to decide whether these vapes and vaping e-cigarettes make a difference regarding health problems, unnecessary disease and death conventionally related to smoking, and/or whether they are causing other or newer problems. In general “when compared to the harmful effects of smoking these studies suggest that vaping could be used as a possible harm reduction tool.

 

There is evidence supporting e-cigarettes as an aide for smoking cessation, at least as currently available FDA-approved NRT’s. Less evidence exists to suggest that e-cigarettes are effective in recovery from nicotine dependence.”

 

Dr. Dominic L. Palazzolo, NIH journalist, goes on to say, “More rigorous research is essential before any solid conclusions can be drawn about the dangers, or usefulness of e-cigarettes. In particular, more rigorous research is required delving into both acute and long-term cardiopulmonary effects of vaping, especially those experiments comparing the effects of vaping with those of smoking.”

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3859972/

 

A 2015 CNBC report stated that even though regulations still presented some issues, many smokers have been eagerly jumping on the vaping bandwagon.

 

How it works is the user is inhaling water vapor through a personal vaporizer or electronic cigarette. When they inhale through  the device, the battery heats the prepared liquid, which is then atomized into an inhal-able vapor.

 

E-cigarettes differ from traditional cigarettes in that there’s no secondhand smoke associated with vaping. Users of nicotine and flavored liquids, according to the report’s author Kate Rogers,  do not get high from consuming such vaporized liquids. I can’t believe she said that, but there you go. I mean, why would anyone do it if there was no feeling of nicotine satiation? You are always free to talk back.

 

“Part of the appeal to smokers and nonsmokers is plain-old curiosity,” said Greg Conley, president of the American Vaping Association, an advocacy group. “There’s more consumer awareness around vaping products, and the technology has so vastly improved in the past five years,” Conley continued.

 

And Professor Brad Rodu of the University of Louisville said this:  “It’s notable that 85% of the 2 million former smokers using e-cigarettes reported quitting in the prior five years, that is  during the time period e-cigarettes have been available.”

http://vaping.info/news/2015/new-cdc-data-shows-smoking-continues-to-fall-as-vaping-increases

 

So tapering down with e-cigarettes might help you quit. It’s not for me to say. My job here is only to tell the story and encourage you to become nicotine free any way you can. The rest is up to you. I hope you will be successful.

 

And again, if you ever want a real person on the phone to support you in your efforts to become a non-smoker, I am always available at Averayugen@mail.com

Tell me about your quitting plans and if we can work together I will give you my special number to call when you feel the need. Beautiful Quitters is a free donations-only service.

My Real Take

 

OK here’s my real take on quitting things that drag us down, otherwise known as addictions. 

If we believe in freedom, that in itself will always help. 

Just remember that whatever drags us down is the stuff that forms the glue of our spirits, so to be free get rid of the “stuff”. 

All the games and scenarios of life and all the baggage, must be shed.

It’s terrifying to be free, and the only quest worth following in life. 

We are mostly not using our spiritual reality to make the world better conform to our dreams. And make no mistake,

 our dreams are more similar than different. 

And here at Beautiful Quitters, that philosophy is endorsed. 

So stay tuned. If anyone accidentally sees this, please write to me in the “response” section. 

Or of course, you can also write to me at Averayugen@mail.com

 

A Smoking Population Was a Deliberate Contrivance

A smoking population in the world was a deliberate contrivance. A world where every third

or forth person smokes…. didn’t just happen because people loved the taste or the effects

 so much.

 

The “public relations” master Edward Bernays in the early twentieth century encouraged

 women to start smoking by appealing to the supposed glamour and sexual allure of

 smoking. It worked.

 

Corporate attorney Louis Powell was invited onto the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon, to

 endorse and encourage the industry of Big Tobacco to increase profits and thereby the

 American Dream…through a new proliferation of smoking and smokers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_F._Powell_Jr.

 

That worked too. 

Why would people have to be PURSUADED to smoke? 

Edward Bernays was a dark figure according to Noam Chomsky.   Related by blood to the

 family of Sigmund Freud, Bernays taught that in order for privileged people to wield power

 anywhere, coercive techniques were really unnecessary, ie: authoritarian coercive Prussian-

type schooling, corporal punishment and the like.

 

All that was really necessary was the right kind of product promotion, and by extension, the

 right kind of seductive techniques designed to get people to eschew their own volition

 regarding true choice making.

 

The age of advertising was born. The age of benign-manipulation is what we had for the last

 century or so but it is becoming increasingly less benign. Walk into any modern thumpa-

thumpa-glitter bar slash pizzeria and you’ll see what I mean about disappearing

 “benign”…..

 

But I digress... 

Whoever thinks choice is involved in modern advertising has been taken in.  These days

 whatever product you buy or are pretty much forced to buy, indicates that you have no

 choice. The fact that you are at all spending money this way is the town crier on this

 block.  And so what does that say about who we are as authentic people?

 

People will quit smoking when they realize they are victims of a deliberate brainwashing

 policy to dominate and control people. The object was and is not even to get them to buy

 one product over another (as it seemed to be in an earlier version of this modern trend)  but

 simply to BE the kind of “creature” that would willingly submit him/herself to such

 domination and control.

 

Early psychoanalysis was perhaps not after all a movement to “liberate” mankind from his

 inner enslavement. Maybe the ultimate purpose was to substitute that with the new,

 happier and more virulent kind of outer enslavement we  have now,  the kind that makes  us

 feel more “free” and “powerful”.  At least when I started smoking as a teenager, I was

 supposed to think doing so was a strike for freedom.

 

I never really bought it but then again I was hooked on the nails and increasingly powerless

 over it (and many things)  for the next 24 years!

 

Quit smoking if you want to feel really free. There’s lots of other stuff you could do but

 quitting the nails would be a great start!!

 

Aveayugen@mail.com

When Awakening This Morning

Here’s a thought snippet I just had when awakening this morning: When guys get hurt, they

 often stifle it, deny it and then hurt someone else. When women get hurt they too often

 blame themselves and then get hurt some more.  Please forgive me for seeming to

 stereotype complicated human reality!  It is just so hard in the middle of a confusing

 painful modern life we all must master, to find a clear vision to greater self-empowerment.

 But I am driven to keep getting better at doing just that.

 

My aim here at Beautiful Quitters is to do my part to liberate everyone to work on restoring

 our bodies, minds, spirits and then spread the healing around widely. We must discover

 valid reasons for our pain and then fight like there’s no tomorrow to feel beautiful in spite

 of our pain and then move on from there. 

We can really make a difference in forging a better world when we see how this

 fatalistically-wounded humanity is really such a scam. Freud wanted to cure neurosis into a

 “merely” normally-hurting mankind instead of an abnormally-suffering mankind. He didn’t

 go far enough though. He forgot to talk about how the quality of being “neurotic” can

 become the new quotidian “normal” to begin with.

https://www.amazon.com/Studies-Hysteria-Basic-Books-Classics/dp/0465082769/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1467568509&sr=1-1&keywords=studies+on+hysteria

 

I say we will always have enough sorrows to fill the world, this morning, tomorrow and

 always…but we also have to strive to reduce any self-imposed suffering in order to begin

 liberating ourselves to make a better world for others too. And there aren’t enough shrinks

 to begin to fill the bill so lets look for our saviors in our friends across the room or across

 the great divides.  We don’t have to suffer from this pervasive social isolation and

 fragmentation we all to some extent are feeling.

 Interesting that we have endless ways of hurting one another, but only two “parties” to

 choose from on election day

 and, if you ask me it’s mostly less than that. Why is one of the supposedly most powerful

 mechanisms for remediation of our social ills….such a parody of what is really

 needed, which is a frank addressing of each and every manifestation of our ghastly still-

gowingsocial/political/economic divisiveness? We need a frank hard addressing  of the

 roots of such myriad examples of such madness!

This insanity can stop if we can learn to see the divisiveness itself as the “enemy” we must

 all fight. It’s not even a paradigm of “elitist” against “populist” as  Constitutional lawyer

 Danny Sheehan  asserts in his modern politics course.

http://www.romeroinstitute.org/docs/Cowl126Syllabus.pdf

 

Instead I say it is presently kind of a cosmic battle between people who resort to more

 divisiveness to “solve” things (ie: to solve violence, we supposedly need more guns for

 tough guys versus the gunless wimps who supposedly don’t wanna solve violence and

 maybe SHOULD be victimized!??!!) AND people who know the false divisions and all

 dichotomies ultimately…are what will doom us unless…unless….

 

And so I say what is needed is more unity, but unity based on what we all have in common,

 including our need to be benignly unique from anyone else.   And it’s really much more

 than even that… our belief in freedom and responsibility and the primacy of the collective

 AND the individual together. It verges on a spiritual upwards “unicotomy”.  And I don’t

 mean a false “unity” and the disturbing kind of   concession-ism that (say) is always touted

 toward the end of our American presidential elections.

 

Rather we need the kind of wider human unity that represents a verifiable leap in human

 development. We are really all the same, hard as it is to feel this at times. We go crazy

 (outwardly or inwardly) when we get hurt enough. And MOST of us don’t know what to do

 at that point, and then what happens is we feel less able to stay authentic and original and

 constrained to sell out to prevailing paradigms of belief and thinking. We don’t WANT to

 “identify with the aggressor” but it happens as we give up our own ability to steer a sane

 and happy course through our own lives.

 

This is so dangerous for potentiality successful quitters of any self-destructive habit. Please

 take this all seriously for I know what I am talking about. There seem to be infinite ways

 for us to cut ourselves off from reality and one another, but the cure is simple.  There’s

 already way too much divisiveness in the world, and so far it hasn’t “worked” at any grand

 level.

 

Some may disagree, but I say it’s the general motive to higher self/other consciousness to

 which MOST religions inspire…that  may have been responsible for most psychic

 improvement in mankind. We only must remember that the social/economic/political

 “disease” that besets us all… is not NATURAL. I say we were born here on this one planet

 to make a happy conscious caring life a desideratum.

 

This animal and plant based planet didn’t need us but at the same time it couldn’t pave the

 way to greater communication and unity with other galaxies either. We might have to pave

 such a relationship and there’s no reason we shouldn’t want to.  After all if unity is the goal,

 where’s the limit, and why would anyone believe in a limit? We all deserve more beautiful

 awakenings every morning. after dreams of unity and a more humane tomorrow!

Averayugen@mail.com

What We Must Quit is Not What’s Been Taken

What we must quit is not what’s been taken. We have had some alarming things taken from our collective soul, and from our planet, but at the same time we must know that that is no excuse to hang onto bad habits.

 

In fact I say it is indeed  now  even more urgent to shed our lives of anything that robs us of our personal and collective power. We need these to make a better world, to relieve suffering anywhere we find it, and to achieve a higher level of meaning in our lives.

So that’s why I am continuing this blog. Nobody wants to be preached to, and nobody wants to be told HOW to do anything never mind just to Do anything (with my apologies cause that’s what I’m really doing on this blog, and saying much more too…)

 

It’s a cheap shot because with a strong enough “why” we can manage any “how” … and moreover we now do and will continue to discover our own hows and techniques.

 

If you still want a “recipe” they exist on the other quit-smoking blogs. They will always be there. But I am approaching the whole subject of addiction from a wider angle.

 

We all know what pain feels like and the idea here is that when we finally get enough personal power to say PAIN IS BAD AND IT CAN AND SHOULD BE REDUCED IN THE WORLD (and maybe the reasons for it too?)…we can then make a really better world where many more of us get our needs met.

 

Because only with some evidence of progress (let’s debate what that means later) can we become truly centered, with pain and gain both in their respective spots on the eternal Wheel of life  but with All Of Us at the Center. And with all the power to all of us.

 

And with these items (things like “progress” for example…) qualified in a way that reflects our private evolution as  humans-in-community, then to that extent we are on the way to a better life-position. It is the only “heaven” we need. The opposite of this “heaven” is best reflected in Art…Johnny Cash for one says it so eloquently! (Please look up the song on You Tube)

I hurt myself today
To see if I still feel
I focus on the pain
The only thing that’s real
The needle tears a hole
The old familiar sting
Try to kill it all away
But I remember everything

What have I become
My sweetest friend
Everyone I know goes away
In the end
And you could have it all
My empire of dirt
I will let you down
I will make you hurt

I wear this crown of thorns
Upon my liar’s chair
Full of broken thoughts
I cannot repair
Beneath the stains of time
The feelings disappear
You are someone else
I am still right here

What have I become

My sweetest friend

Everyone I know

Goes away in the end

And you could have it all

My empire of dirt

I will let you down

I will make you hurt

If I could start again

A million miles away

I would keep myself

I would find a way…

Johnny Cash

**********************************************************************************

This song is about the personal feeling of failure as reflected in loneliness and the loneliness of failure itself. And it all goes with a lessening of personal power. And I say that the paradox of a growing self- knowledge always reveals ourselves to be actually MORE present (responsible, vulnerable) in our loneliest moments.

We see all our weaknesses then. We see it all, our co dependencies, our personal “surrenders” to imprisoning kinds of things. All of it.

Sad.  So eloquently said and so true.

And so I also must say that the Beautiful Quitters of this world…really do “get” it….  In spite of all their own continuing personal and collective sorrows, they know what continues to be taken from us as a human body and human race and planetary collective and so willingly or not they see what the “game” of Life  really is.

But they have also learned and keep learning how to live more authentically and powerfully in the face of “it”!

Join us!

Talk to me at: Averayugen@mail.com