The Dino-Aspie Ex-Café (for Those 40+... or feeling creaky)

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Krex,
Voice of experience here. Sinus Rinse (available at any pharmacy, I think) is infinitely easier and better than the netti pot.

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Oh, you'll be so glad if you get a Neti Pot, Krex. When I first used one, it was weird, but if you follow the instructions, you won't gag. Properly used, the neti pot will send a stream of water into one nostril, and right out the other. Only if you forget to position your head properly, does the water run down your throat. Sometimes I add a drop of food grade peppermint essential oil to the saline solution, and it makes my sinuses feel so good. I also recommend using distilled or purified water, because the chlorine in tap water does burn, even if you add sea salt.

Hello krex,

I work as a Pulmonary Rehabilitation Coordinator. One of my roles is smoking cessation.

Quitting cold turkey is incredibly difficult and has 3 - 5% success rate.

To quit smoking you need to address the physiological addition to nicotine + psychological addiction.

There are medications out there to help with smoking cessation. One drug that is new to Australia (been around in the USA longer) is Varenicline.

An older smoking cessation drug is Zyban that started off life as an anti-depressant. It didn't work very well as an anti-depressant but in approximately 1/3 of patients was a 'magic fairy dust' .... they lost urge to smoke and quit. In another 1/3 of patients it reduces cravings for cigarettes.

Chuck, can you talk more about Varinicline and Zyban. I am by no means an expert in pharmacology!

If medications are not the way to go, I strongly recommend Nicotine Replacement Therapy.

Nicotine is more addictive than heroin! It is superbly addictive because .... within 10 seconds of inhaling you get your 'hit' to your brain. Within 40 minutes your nicotine blood levels have dropped and you get all sorts of awful withdrawls.

To turn off the nicotine receptors in the brain you need to keep your nicotine blood levels stable for a minimum of 7 weeks. This involves the use of nicotine patches, gum, lozenges.

You can smoke and use patches. You can use patches and gum and lozenges.

Renee Bittoun is our Australian guru of smoking cessation. At any conference that she speaks at there is a revered silence when she first gets on stage. (She also speaks 6 languges fluently .... hmmm she's intelligent, an expert in her field ..... is she Aspie?

Renee Bittoun is editor of 'The Journal of Smoking Cessation'.

Many smokers have not succeeded in quitting using a single nicotine replacement mode. An algorithm was developed for clinicians to enhance success rates when recommending nicotine
replacement therapy (NRT) to smoking patients. The algorithm is based on clinical experience with
chronic smokers with respiratory illnesses attending one-on-one smokers clinics in the Central Sydney Area Health Service. Based on transdermal nicotine therapy (patch) other forms of NRT are added if required for ‘breakout’ smoking for 2 weeks. Outcomes have shown 60% confirmed continuous abstinence at 3 months. Smokers can be safely and successfully treated symptomatically for nicotine withdrawal relief using combination NRT aggressively.

http://www.australianacademicpress.com.au/Publications/Journals/smoke_cessation/JSC_Bittoun.pdf

Renee is in the process of double-blind trials.

I hope this information is a useful beginning.

Helen

it always amazes me when people think somehow there is some sort of social norm here. I would imagine if anyone even thought of it, no one else would agree, anyway.

Merle

krex,

Nicotine is the greatest drug for relieving anxiety. No other medication can beat it.

You need to look at other ways for relieving your anxiety. Another WP member, syzygyish has made this:

http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=154922533

Also, when you're smoking you have a constant roller-coaster of withdrawls. 40 minutes after a cigarette you will be getting major withdrawls .... including anxiety, agitations, anger etc

With Asperger's, anxiety is a co-morbidity. With smoking, ongoing anxiety/agitation is part of the ongoing withdrawls. It is impossible to know how much anxiety/agitation/anger is from ongoing withdrawls and how much is from Asperger's .....

Also, I've noted you posted about your post-nasal drop.

You will find when you quit smoking you will cough more. This is because nicotine is a cough supressant.

Another common occurence with quitting is getting mouth ulcers.

48 hours after your last cigarette is the worst. This is because all the nicotine has left your blood and you will feel like crap!

Statistically if you make it past 2 weeks without a cigarette, your odds for staying off them are pretty good.

Try to find a time in your life when you are least stressed to smoke.

We advise harm minimisation with people who are not yet ready to quit. Smoke the heaviest brand you can find. The 'light' brands (with lower nicotine levels) are actually much, much worse for you. You have to inhale deeper to get your hit of nicotine. Therefore you inhale more of the crap into your lungs.

Throw away your 'light' brands. Get your heavy brand! Watch out for big law suits in the future (in fact I think I vaguely heard of a class action in USA regarding this issue).

Some newer nasty cancers are being seen .... deeper in the lungs than previously seen. And guess what .... these are the people that smoked the light brands!

Patients always look at me like I'm crazy when I tell them to buy heavy brands!

Helen

my goodness, I just read a whole thread on people singing the praises of the netipot!

I am laughing so hard at this photo I fear I may pop something. Back in the day (ask your mother, dear Smelena) I would use that wide ( 42 inch) pallet wrapping plastic wrap and wrap them tight around very willing men and women. The idea was to decompress by compressing.
After I wrapped them (with or with out a dense velvet body sheath) I would 'spot' for them, making sure they were breathing regular and ready with my bandage shears ready to zip them out in an heartbeat. We also used a twin sized water bed bladder with a vacuum cleaner attached. One would slip into the bladder that had a folded seal and a face hole cut out at one end. The seal would be fixed and the vacuum turned on and the air sucked out of the bag causing the decompresser to be evenly compressed to just the right amount and the vacuum turned off, effectively shrink wrapping the decompresser.
People just LOVED it!
For this awesome task, they would clean my house, do my laundry, run my errands. I had men build me a breakfast bar, built in bookcases and deliver and set up a canopy bed. I still have the painted faux marble columns and bed side shelves.

Merle

(I never tried any of these delights. I am intensly claustrophobic, the mere thought of being confined like that gives me bonkus of the conkus and colored marbles.)

My younger son owns a book called The Daredevil's Manual. Chapter 2 is titled "Sucking Spaghetti into the Mouth and Blowing it Out the Nose". Some guy in New Mexico, USA has entered the Guinness Book of World Records for blowing a piece of spaghetti a record 7-and-a-half-inch distance out of his nose. He can also achieve the "nasal floss" effect by sucking one end of the spaghetti into one nostril, and blowing it out the other.

Years ago I read a magazine article about some group of up'n'coming trendoids who did the same trick with lengths of metal ball-chain; they called it "brain flossing".

A neti pot seems relatively benign in comparison with all this.

We all produce, and swallow unconsciously, a certain amount of secretion from the mucous membranes, and that's optimal. What isn't optimal is spending a large percentage of your day gagging, coughing, sneezing, or just going around making irritating "ahem" noises. My approach to this problem is as follows:

• Drink water. Lots and lots of water. Not merely in industrial amounts, but in Niagara-like amounts. The Canadian side, not the American. Good for the bowel and urinary tract as well. Common-or-garden tap water works fine for me; your mileage may vary.
• Meditate. I don't know why, but this usually helps my sinuses to clear. YMMV.
• Use nasal spray. I've tried several. Some made me throw up; some did nothing at all. The most effective one I've used (to date) is Cromolyn, active ingredient sodium cromoglycate. If anyone has other recommendations, I wouldn't mind hearing them.

As nannarob mentioned, I've put some thought into the composition and demographics of people who hang out in the Dino-Aspie Ex-Café. And my conclusion? We none of us have one damned thing in common except for a willingness to lob into the place, clad in hair curlers, fluffy pink slippers & bathrobe, or in full battle gear à la Boadicea, and rant & rave & spout random bullsh!t. And a willingness to show acceptance when others do the same. Oh, and a complete lack of desire to engage in groupthink. Maybe someone else can think of a time when everyone in the Café has been unanimous about something; I sure can't.

we are unanimous about posting here, dear.

and that's about it.

Merle

Yer not wrong, Merle.

[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=ifbCsrz92Yc[/youtube]

Good luck giving up the eucalyptus. Give it at least 2, or even 3-4, weeks to see if anything changes, because it will take a while for your body to retrieve anything like a non-irritated state.

With ref : smoking;
I have always stopped cold turkey. And have managed many years smoke free at different points. At the moment it is two and a half years no smoke.
It's not the chemicals that are the problem, but the psychology.

I discovered that I was comforted by, (and therefore addicted to), having a need for something which I could satisfy myself, without asking someone else, without being dependent on anyone else to satisfy it. It gave me a feeling of power. "I can deal with this need myself/on my own".

Don't go and get hooked on pills, plasters/patches or any other scam making money on the backs of vulnerable people, but work out what you get out of smoking. Forget the chemical side of it. It's precisely because there is almost no chemical satisfaction in smoking that it is so susceptible to psychological addiction.

I still think the eucalyptus is the big problem.

Are you an expert on smoking addiction, Ouinon? Or are ypu only speaking from your own experience?

I'll just phone Renee Bittoun and tell her that the last 30 years of research and clinical experience she has conducted is wrong.

Helen

Well, it is a conclusion based on my own independent experience ,( which i had thought about a lot in trying to understand the phenomenon of smoking, and addiction in general) , so it was very interesting to find that it is almost identical to the analysis by Allen Carr, in his internationally acclaimed method to stop smoking, as described by Wiki, at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Carr