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Quit Vaping
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Description
A simple, proven 28-day program that shows you how to quit vaping and will help you stop for good!
This simple, 28-day program provides specific actions to take, day by day, as you free yourself from nicotine addiction. Key information and special considerations throughout help and guide parents of young vapers through the process as well. Learn how to create a quit plan, build a support team, follow a detox, change your inner dialogue, manage your cravings, and become a non-vaper.
Certified interventionist Brad Lamm debunks the myths spread by the thriving e-cigarette industry and its supporters, revealing the truth about the effects of inhaling these highly dangerous aerosols. Then he offers a step-by-step blueprint to break free of its grip. The plan offers a rich variety of strategies, tactics, hacks, exercises, research, and inspiring stories of people who have quit the habit using Lamm’s proven program.
A PENGUIN LIFE TITLE Praise for How to Help the One You Love by Brad Lamm:
“The deeply dedicated counselor presents a four- step method based in his experiences on both sides of the process. . . . As a thorough guide to helping substance abusers find help, this makes a valuable addition to the self- help shelves.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)Brad Lamm, CIP, is an author, teacher, and interventionist best known for helping people make life-enhancing change on The Dr. Phil Show, The Doctors, and Today. He has managed more than 1,000 interventions, visited hundreds of treatment facilities across the country, presented before Parliament in the UK, served on the board of the Association of Intervention Specialists, collaborated with the most knowledgeable specialists in the field of recovery treatment, and worked at the state level to introduce treatment options to communities. In 2012, he opened the Breathe Life Healing Center, which uses industry-leading techniques to provide powerful treatment for body, mind, and spirit.Part One
Lies and Facts
Myths and Truths
In May 2018, a thirty-eight-year-old man was vaping at his home in St. Petersburg, Florida, when the device’s battery exploded. Metal fragments from his vape pen shot into his skull, killing him instantly and igniting a fire at the same time, according to the St. Petersburg deputy fire marshal, as quoted in a CNBC article on the deadly event. It was the first vaping accident fatality in America.
Officials attributed the malfunction to a drop-in battery called the 18650. Certain types of e-cigs called mechanical mods, which allow vapers to control the intensity of their vaping experiences, use this battery. Vapers have to remove the 18650s and recharge them regularly. Repeatedly removing this battery from and reinserting it into vaping devices or chargers can damage its insulating wrapper, compromising the safety of the battery and increasing the risk of explosion. If a vaper draws too much power off the 18650 or if it’s damaged, metal-on-metal contact can cause it to explode.
Because it allows users to throttle the power level, the 18650 has grown popular among hard-core vapers, and despite the risk of death, a robust secondary market for it exists online, particularly on auction sites. As with many products like this sold in secondary forums, you don’t know exactly what you’re buying. The batteries could be counterfeit or refurbished and fail.
Nor did the St. Petersburg death represent a one-in-a-billion freak occurrence. Similar tragic outcomes have befallen other vapers. In January 2019, the e-cig of a Texas man exploded, shooting a shard of metal into his neck, severing an artery, and killing him, too. He was just twenty-four years old. His name was William Eric Brown.
Calamities like this and the shock and grief they bring continue to dominate headlines. Truth Initiative, America’s largest not-for-profit organization dedicated to eradicating tobacco use, has been tracking vaping injuries reported by hospitals and burn centers. “Defective, poorly manufactured, and improperly modified e-cigarettes have been known to explode and cause injury,” the organization confirmed. A George Mason University study estimated that between 2015 and 2017 more than two thousand Americans visited emergency rooms to seek treatment for burns from e-cigarettes and injuries related to exploding vaping devices.
If the device itself doesn’t kill you, the liquid in it will. But numerous multimillion-dollar companies have a vested interest in convincing everyone that their products are safe and worth buying. That brazen hoax succeeds by means of a diabolically executed marketing and advertising campaign based on smoke and mirrors.
Behind the Smoke Screen
Vaping initially surged in popularity because most people thought that it represented a safer alternative to smoking cigarettes. That belief is categorically false. Vape companies, Big Tobacco, which owns a stake in them, their “research” lackeys, and lobbying groups such as the American Vaping Association have propagated a smoky cloud of myths to obscure the truth about e-cigarettes. Together, they sing a devil’s chorus that e-cigs are safe and there’s no cause for alarm.
Let’s go behind their smoke screen to discover the truth for ourselves. Here are seven dangerous myths about vaping and the corresponding truths that you should know about them.
Myth 1: Vaping can help you quit smoking.
Truth: It won’t.
According to the Center on Addiction, a national not-for-profit organization dedicated to stopping substance abuse: “There is little evidence that they [e-cigs] reliably reduce cigarette smoking or lead to smoking cessation. In fact, the nicotine contained in e-cigarettes and other vaping products may actually perpetuate addiction, in some cases making it even harder to quit smoking.”
Addiction is addiction. Replacing one harmful addiction with another doesn’t make either of them less toxic or either substance less addictive. Harm reduction techniques work best for addictions when based on rigorous scientific evidence and not Big Vape lies. Vaping produces exactly the same cycle of behavior as any other addictive substance: use, response, crave, repeat.
Almost one in twenty American adults uses e-cigarettes, and nearly 60 percent of smokers vape as well. Absorbing two different sets of toxins, more or less simultaneously, can do extreme harm to your body.
Myth 2: Vaping is safer than smoking cigarettes.
Truth: Vaping is as toxic as cigarettes, if not more so.
E-cigarette manufacturers have been feeding people this lie from day one. Smokers burn dried, shredded tobacco leaves and inhale the resulting smoke. Vapers heat a nicotine-based liquid full of noxious chemicals, which produces an inhalable aerosol, commonly called a vapor. One of those toxic chemicals, propylene glycol, dangerously inflames lung tissue.
The media has reported seemingly countless cases of vapers becoming seriously sick or dying, but vape companies still hawk their wares as a safer way to smoke. Many people don’t understand, though, that pro-tobacco researchers or scientists paid by Big Tobacco conducted much of the “research” on vaping that has taken place over the last dozen years. That’s a blatant, shameful, unscientific conflict of interest.
Because of the alarming increase in instances of EVALI, proper research is heating up. A 2017 study published in the American Journal of Physiology-Lung Cellular and Molecular Physiology noted that a rapidly growing body of evidence taken from human studies shows that e-cigarette use has significant lung toxicity, as seen in increasing instances of coughing and phlegm production, bronchitis, asthma, and the frequency and severity of acute bacterial and viral infections.
Vape supporters claim that the risks are relatively unknown, which is also a total lie. Numerous national news outlets reported in August 2019 that medical officials admitted a Utah teen to the ICU who had become so sick from vaping that they had to put her in a medically induced coma in order to treat her. Chest X-rays revealed that she had fat clumps in her lungs linked to the glycerin in the vape juice she had been smoking. Her doctors said that her chest X-rays were some of the worst that they had seen, ever.
It doesn’t get any clearer than this: according to the CDC, “Besides nicotine, e-cigarettes contain harmful and potentially harmful ingredients, including ultrafine particles that can be inhaled deep into the lungs, flavorants such as diacetyl (a chemical linked to serious lung disease), volatile organic compounds, and heavy metals, such as nickel, tin, and lead.”
Myth 3: Vaping products are FDA approved.
Truth: Neither the FDA nor other government agencies have approved or meaningfully regulated vaping products.
The FDA hasn’t endorsed e-cigs of any kind for any reason-not even to help people quit smoking-nor has it set any limits on how much nicotine or what other chemicals these devices can contain.
Surprising, right?
From the beginning, officials from the Obama administration who were in the pocket of Big Tobacco either delayed or weakened the regulation of vaping products, setting a precedent for federal inaction. Scott Gottlieb, a physician, once served on the board of a chain of vaping lounges, and President Trump appointed him head of the FDA in 2017. Gottlieb left the agency two years later. Since then, the Trump administration announced that it would ban flavored e-cigarettes, but backlash from the vaping industry prompted officials to reconsider the ban.
Bottom line: a lack of proper governmental regulations allowed an unscrupulous industry to hook a new generation on nicotine.
According to its own website, however, the FDA has taken the following actions:
All tobacco products, including e-cigarettes, must feature a large, clearly readable warning label: “WARNING: This product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical.”
In August 2016, the FDA made it illegal to sell e-cigarettes and any other kind of electronic nicotine device to people under age eighteen. Retailers are legally responsible for checking photo IDs of anyone under age twenty-seven who tries to buy tobacco products, including e-cigs. As of December 2019, Congress raised the age to twenty-one for nicotine products.
In July 2019, the FDA announced the launch of its first vape-prevention TV ads educating kids about the dangers of e-cigarette use. The FDA will provide new posters for high schools and educational materials for middle schools across the country.
The FDA conducts regular inspections of e-cigarette manufacturing facilities, including vape shops that make or modify vaping products. Since 2016, it has conducted more than twelve hundred inspections to confirm that these manufacturers and retailers are complying with regulations, including not selling tobacco products to minors.
But federal regulations still fall short in the marketing and advertising arena. E-cigarette manufacturers can create and spread marketing materials that imply vaping is safe and risk free and that promote the vaping lifestyle as fun and exciting-all of which appeals directly to young adults, teens, and kids.
Myth 4: Vaping has no health risks.
Truth: Vaping can kill you.
Many pro-vaping sources claim that e-cigarettes contain none of the dangers of traditional cigarettes. Again, not true. Drawn from science-based, nonbiased research published in 2018 in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences and various news reports, here’s just a partial list of the terrifying health risks.
Free Radicals: These renegade molecules damage organs and other tissues in your body. They also cause harmful chemical reactions that injure cells, making it difficult for you to resist infections. Vaping juice increases free-radical production and decreases glutathione, a protective free-radical fighter, or antioxidant. Other antioxidants can’t function properly without glutathione, which recharges and recycles them. When levels of glutathione drop, your body can’t protect its own immune system or detoxify itself.
Weakened Immunity: E-cigarettes can cripple your body’s ability to fight unwanted bacteria and weaken the infection-fighting white blood cells that help against viruses, parasites, and fungi. In a 2016 study published in the American Journal of Physiology-Lung Cellular and Molecular Physiology, researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill analyzed cells scraped from the nasal cavities of volunteers. Some samples came from smokers, some from vapers, and other volunteers did neither. The researchers measured the activity of 594 immunity-linked genes in these cells. In the smoker samples, 53 genes had lower activity levels than usual. Among vapers, those same 53 genes also had lower activity levels, as did another 305 genes. What does that mean? For your immune system, vaping is worse for you than smoking.
Lung Damage: In October 2019, pathologists from the Mayo Clinic, America’s number one hospital, reviewed the chest X-rays and samples of lung tissue from seventeen people hospitalized after vaping nicotine or marijuana products. The ages of the patients ranged from nineteen to sixty-seven. Two specimens came from people who had died. All of the X-rays showed a pattern of opaque white spots and the appearance of what doctors are calling ground-glass lung.
“All 17 of our cases show a pattern of injury in the lung that looks like a toxic chemical exposure, toxic chemical fume exposure, or a chemical burn injury,” said Dr. Brandon Larsen, a surgical pathologist at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Arizona, as reported in a New York Times article. “They look like the kind of change you would expect to see in an unfortunate worker in an industrial accident where a big barrel of toxic chemicals spills and that person is exposed to toxic fumes and there is a chemical burn in the airways.”
He added that the damage resembled exposure to the chemical weapons used in World War I. The New England Journal of Medicine published the Mayo Clinic team’s findings in October 2019.
A study published in Cancer Prevention Research in October 2019 reported the first evidence of lung inflammation directly correlated with e-cig use. The study involved nonsmoking volunteers who, for research purposes, used e-cigarettes twice a day for one month. The e-cigs contained no nicotine or flavoring, but they did contain propylene glycol and glycerin, as many vape juices do, which the medical researchers linked to increases in inflammatory cell counts in participants’ lungs. The study results suggest that even short-term vaping can cause measurable damage at the cellular level. We know that respiratory inflammation from nicotine exposure can drive lung cancer and other diseases, such as incurable COPD, so vaping does double damage to the lungs.
These problems aren’t theoretical or happening in the distant future, either. They’re happening now. In July 2019, Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin admitted eight teenagers with severe lung damage that doctors suspected stemmed from vaping. Their acute symptoms included extreme coughing, shortness of breath, and relentless fatigue. Some had lost significant amounts of weight from vomiting and diarrhea. Dr. Louella Amos, a pediatric pulmonologist who treated the teens, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that the kids had reached “the point where they can’t breathe.” She noted that the symptoms developed rapidly and didn’t result from consistent use over time.
Serious lung damage doesn’t always result from the vitamin E acetate in THC vapes, either. Jeremy, a twenty-nine-year-old medical technician, worked at a small hospital owned by Breathe Life Healing Centers. The vape juice he used didn’t contain vitamin E acetate or THC but rather a vegetable oil, which, when heated, can prove just as harmful. In 2019, medical officials had to put him into a medical coma to treat the damage to his lungs from inhaling that oil. Jeremy survived-just barely-and later asked me to help him quit vaping. All vapes contain oil, and the harm it causes when inhaled is unlike anything that many medical experts have seen before.
Liver Damage: E-cigarette aerosol contains propylene glycol. Your liver metabolizes that chemical into propionaldehyde, which is related to formaldehyde, a known carcinogen as classified by the National Cancer Institute. When propionaldehyde accumulates in the body, it increases the potential for severe liver damage.
Vision Damage: According to a 2015 study in Current Eye Research, nicotine decreases the thickness of the retina, which can jeopardize your vision. The other chemicals in e-cigs can accumulate in the retina as well, so vapers run the risk of double damage to their eyes and even blindness.
Heart Problems: West Virginia University studies with lab animals show that vaping can stiffen arteries, leading to cardiovascular injury. In other animal studies, vaping aerosol caused reduced heart function, pericardial edema (a dangerous buildup of fluid around the heart), and even heart malformation. A recent study by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, concluded that daily use of e-cigarettes may double your odds of a heart attack.
Cancer: Scientists are investigating whether e-cigarettes cause cancer in animals and humans. Vaping aerosol contains cancer-causing chemicals, such as propionaldehyde, as well as trace metals such as aluminum, cadmium, nickel, and tin. A 2019 review published in Biological Trace Element Research associates those metals in particular with lung, mouth, and nasal cancers.
A 2018 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that e-cig vapor caused DNA damage in the lungs and bladders of mice and inhibited DNA repair in their lung tissue. Of forty mice exposed to e-cigarette vapor containing nicotine over the course of fifty-four weeks, 22 percent developed lung cancer, and 57 percent developed precancerous lesions in their bladders.US
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| Subjects | quit vapeing, addiction books, SEL026000, recovery books for addiction, quit smoking, will power, stop smoking, teen health, juul, easy way, personal growth books, quit juuling, brad lamb, stop vaping, how to quit vaping, how to quit smoking, brad lamm, quit vaping, vaping, lung health, motivational books, wellness, self help, health, happiness, HEA010000, motivation, fitness, self help books, clean, healing, intervention, health and wellness, health books, fitness books, medical books, health and fitness, self development books, self improvement books |