We’ve all heard the negative effects of smoking on our
health. Have you ever thought about the
negative effects smoking has on your pocketbook? Smokers that smoke a pack a day (and spend $5
a pack), spend $1,825 per year on cigarettes.
That’s $18,250 wasted over a decade!
Now, consider if that money had been invested instead of being spent on
cigarettes. Michael
Rabinoff, a psychiatrist and author of “Ending the Tobacco Holocaust: How
Big Tobacco Affects Our Health, Pocketbook and Political Freedom–And What We
Can Do About It,” offers the following calculation: “Imagine you took $2,000 a year spent on
smoking from age 18 to age 65 and invested it annually in a Roth IRA that
returned 11 percent per year. You would have a tax-free cash hoard of nearly $3
million.”
The Center for Disease Control estimated in 1999 that for every pack of cigarettes you purchase, you are spending an additional $7.18 in hidden costs due to increased healthcare spending and lost productivity. So, now you can more than double the amount you are spending each year on a habit that will ultimately kill you…and you can more than double the amount of money you could have had if you had invested all that money. Six million dollars would be nice, wouldn’t it?
So, quit already! My favorite approach involves the use of acupuncture. There are more than 300 acupuncture-based substance abuse programs in the United States. In a seminar I attended in the early 1990’s the statistics then showed acupuncture to be 81% more effective than any other treatment methods for cigarette and drug use and the recidivism rate (the rate at which they start up again) was only 1% (compared to 11% nationally with other treatment options).
Acupuncture suppresses cravings, works to calm anxiousness, irritability, weepiness, anger and other emotional challenges, and assists the body in detoxifying from the addictive substances. It also helps suppress overeating so the individual doesn’t gain weight. No other treatment approaches can do all that.
A doctor once told me he thought acupuncture was a placebo. It isn’t. A few years ago I was treating a man for an unrelated condition. One day he came in and announced that he was thinking it was time to quit smoking. I said “Great!” Along with my treatment for his condition, I added “stop smoking” points. One week later he came in and said “The oddest thing has happened this week! I haven’t had the slightest desire to smoke all week. I haven’t had a single cigarette!” I wasn’t surprised because I see that all the time when I treat people to stop smoking, and so I told him that. He responded “I didn’t tell you I wanted to stop smoking! I said I was thinking about quitting!”
When you are ready to quit smoking, call us at 208-765-1994 to set up your first acupuncture to stop smoking treatment, and we’ll help you on the road to a healthier new you!
© 2009 Holly A. Carling, O.M.D., L.Ac., Ph.D.
