Acupuncture or hypnosis have been encouraged as drug-free methods to help smokers to quit and a number of evidence has shown that both techniques work well. Generally, smokers who want to kick the habit should firstly try the standard approaches, including nicotine-replacement therapy, medications and behavioral counseling.
In order to see the impact of acupuncture and hypnosis, researchers from McGill University in Montreal, Canada, examined four studies, of which two verified the impact of acupuncture and two verified the impact of hypnosis. The first study ran a few sessions of laser acupuncture on more than two hundred and fifty smokers.
The study showed that around fifty-five percent of smokers who had received the treatment quit the habit in six months, compared to four percent who had not received the treatment. However, the earlier study conducted in Taiwan, that examined the effects of needle acupuncture around the ear, the area typically targeted for smoking cessation, reported a lower rate of success.
Only nine percent of smoker who were given acupuncture therapy had quit after six months compared to six percent quit without the treatment. The situation was similar for the hypnosis trials. Two trails showed a significant impact rages from twenty to forty percent in patients treated with hypnosis. The smokers had quit after six months of receiving the therapy. The other two trials showed lesser effects.
Lead author Mehdi Tahiri, stated some people are not interested in medication and in many cases the standard therapies had not worked. Then they should definitely recommend acupuncture and hypnosis as alternatives. There was a trend toward a benefit across all of the studies of acupuncture and hypnosis. But the alternatives should still stand as options for smokers determined to break the habit.
Several studies had shown that smokers subjected to acupuncture were more than three times as likely to be tobacco-free in six months to one year. Similarly, hypnosis had a higher success rate with the therapy compared smoker who had nominal help. The study findings were published in the American Journal of Medicine.