Smoking patches to quit smoking -
Can a nicotine patch help?
Just like women need to use hormone patches on the body to restore the balance of hormones due to certain medical conditions and age problems, there are now available in the market a brand of products belonging to the category of nicotine replacement therapies call the smoking patch or the nicotine patch. The total number of smoking patches that are required depends on the person as the dosage; the amount of smoking and the total time period of the treatment vary from one individual smoker to the other.
A smoking patch should be prescribed by a doctor and expert supervision is definitely necessary and in fact mandatory if you want to be rest assured that what you are doing is actually helping you and your body and not harming it in any further way. This product made its very first appearance in the market almost over fifteen years ago. So, the smoking patch method is a tried and tested one and a great deal of research and plenty of scientific studies have gone into the understanding of how it actually works and how effective it could be to help smokers quit the habit of smoking altogether.
For no possible reason that can support it or explain it, the smoking patches always come in dosages that tend to be multiples of seven. Therefore, you can buy them with a set dosage of either 7 mg or 14 mg or 21 mg. On an average, each cigarette smoke delivers around 1 mg of nicotine when smoked completely. Therefore, using simple math and using this calculation, heavy smokers would use the 21 mg and as they are gradually weaned away, in the last few months of the nicotine replacement therapy, it is brought down to the lowest dosage of just around 7 mg.
Some of the problems commonly associated with using the nicotine patch are the area where the patch is worn might swell up and become red and cause a lot of irritation due to itching. It usually subsides in a time period of around thirty minutes to an hour after which the smoking patches should be worn in another part of the body. The smoking patches are also sold based on the number of hours it can release the nicotine slowly. Some of them are twenty-four hour patches while some help over a time period of sixteen or seventeen hours. The nicotine patch can also be worn when you sleep or you can wear it the whole day and then get rid off it just before you go to bed. Wearing it in the night may not be a very good idea, as it is known to cause disturbances in the sleep. Moreover, you will have a craving for nicotine in the morning again if you are a morning smokier and resort to the use of the smoking patches once again.
The nicotine patch releases the nicotine into the body and the highest concentration is reached only after two to four hours.
