Comment by zozbot234
4 months ago
The interesting thing wrt. this is that nicotine replacement products are widely available without a prescription. Would people really get seriously addicted to e.g. wearing a transdermal patch?
4 months ago
The interesting thing wrt. this is that nicotine replacement products are widely available without a prescription. Would people really get seriously addicted to e.g. wearing a transdermal patch?
For N=1 (me), yes. I’ve been a smoker since I was about 12 years old and have tried to quit multiple times (short-term successfully a few times). I’ve had a few experiences with transdermal nicotine.
When I was in the hospital and couldn’t get out of bed, the nurses provided me with some. They seemed to be partially working, but I was still having pretty intense cravings all the time. After doing a bit of napkin math I realized that the patches were only providing about 1/3 of the daily nicotine I’d been consuming before my appendectomy.
When I tried to quit on my own, I started out with the recommended dosage from the package and had the same experience. They modulated the cravings a bit but were nowhere near effective enough to actually allow me to go through the day without chronic acute cravings. I bumped up my daily dose from the patches and did successfully stop smoking, but trying to reduce the dose too much led to the same brutal cravings. I ended up abandoning patches as a way to quit because of the daily hassle of trying to slowly wean myself off of the patches; a full patch decrement was too much at once, so I was cutting them into halves and quarters to try to make progress without ruining my concentration and focus.
> ...without ruining my concentration and focus.
I suspect that this just isn't in the cards given that kind of situation. You're ultimately just better off suffering through that withdrawal (especially since you've said you were in a frickin' hospital to begin with. It's not like you're losing that much effectiveness and productivity) and trying to find a new normal after the worst symptoms are over. It might take some time but our best guess is that kind of habituation is not permanent, so you should see quite a bit of improvement over time if you just stick to it.
I used to vape and I had the worst time quitting nicotine. I tapered down to around 25% of my usual daily intake over the period of about 3 months before I decided to quit for good. Even then, for about 3 weeks I felt incredibly tired all the time, yet I couldn't sleep, and I felt borderline mentally retarded... it was really bad. It took me about 3 months to feel more or less normal again, and cravings completely went away when I was properly diagnosed with ADHD and started medication about a year later.
> thread about ADHD
> so you should see quite a bit of improvement over time if you just stick to it.
:D
I'm surprised they gave you nicotine patches - was this an American hospital? I always thought they want you to suffer withdrawal as a punishment for the moral failure of being a smoker. Also, there are probably some risks with throwing nicotine into the mix of whatever drugs they might be giving you.
I used the patch to quit, and I used to enjoy slapping those patches on in the morning almost as much as I enjoyed a morning cigarette.
Canadian hospital. It was an appendectomy, the only other medication I was on was morphine. The nurse actually offered the patches to me on her own after noticing a pack of smokes in the pocket of the sweater I was wearing when I went to the ER.
Humans can get addicted to anything that triggers a reward. Even things that seem gross or weird, like picking your scabs. The line between addiction and compulsion is kind of blurry.