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If you’ve ever been
addicted to tobacco products and tried to quit the
habit, you know the physical and psychological
discomforts you can experience – cravings, anxiety and
irritability, to name just a few.
The professionals at ICAN
understand this. Our alternative medical smoking
cessation treatment consists of a combination of safe,
non-addictive, FDA-approved and well known medications
to block the effects of nicotine. These medications have
been approved for a variety of applications and their
use for the treatment of smoking cessations is
considered “off-label.” Such “off-label” use of
medicines is common practice for a wide variety of
medications. The treatment is administered to the
patient through tiny injections that utilize the J-tip
needless injector.
These medications greatly
minimize or stop the overwhelming urges and withdrawal
symptoms typically associated with quitting – providing
or allowing you the ability to break your habitual
side of nicotine addiction. The basis of the ICAN
treatment is allowing your body to do what it wants to
do naturally. Although the majority of the nicotine is
eliminated from the body in three days, the
normalization of your body chemistry may go on for up to
two weeks. Patients are provided follow up medications
to maintain a lower continuing block to insure that
patients experience little or no discomfort during this
time period.
How Addiction Works
When you start smoking or
chewing/dipping tobacco your body introduces nicotine
into your system. Nicotine is a highly addictive
substance that fools your brain into releasing a
“pleasure” chemical called dopamine. It’s dopamine that
gives you that false sense of well-being, and soon your
body wants more and more dopamine on a regular basis.
As you continue to use
tobacco, your body becomes accustomed to having a certain
level of nicotine. If you don’t maintain that level, parts
of your brain will signal that your body requires more. In
other words, you begin to feel the “need to feed” your
addiction.
How Nicotine Works
Nicotine is
similar chemically to the neurotransmitter
acetylcholine (ACh). Because of this similarity,
both nicotine and acetylcholine compete to occupy
ACh nicotinic receptors. As a result of increased
demand for ACh nicotinic receptors, the body
manufactures more of such receptor sites. In
addition to increasing the number of nicotinic
receptors, in time, nicotine desensitizes these
receptors.
Therefore, when the
amount of nicotine in the blood drops below a certain
level, its blocking affect on nicotinic receptors
diminishes. The result is a bombardment of ACh at those
sites – what you know and experience as “nicotine
withdrawal symptoms.” By lighting up or dipping, you
reintroduce nicotine, which in turn inhibits the
nicotine receptors and blocks the ACh bombardment. Once
again, you “feel normal.”
If you’re consistently
using tobacco products of any kind, you probably don’t
recognize that your body is telling you it needs nicotine.
You simply smoke another cigarette or take another dip or
chew. However, when you attempt to quit, you are
intentionally depriving your body of nicotine. That’s when
you become all too aware of the messages your body is
sending. You experience insatiable cravings for nicotine and
suffer withdrawal symptoms, such as, irritability, anxiety,
headache, nausea, fatigue or insomnia.
Why the ICAN
Treatment Works
The ICAN treatment, which
consists of a combination of safe, non-addictive
medications, is so effective because it blocks parts of
your brain that sense and communicate to the rest of
your body that you are experiencing nicotine withdrawal.
More specifically, these treatment medications block
parts of your brain that normally would tell your body
that you need another cigarette, dip or chew of tobacco
to maintain the level of nicotine to which your body has
become accustomed.
With these parts of your
brain blocked, your urges and cravings for nicotine are
greatly reduced, if not totally eliminated. This
treatment allows you to immediately break the
physiological aspects of your addiction and focus on the
other significant aspect of breaking your nicotine
addiction – the behavioral/psychological aspect.
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