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Freedom from Smoking Related Links
Locations (Click on location for directions and hours)
(262) 437-7347
(414) 433-4931
(608) 332-6292
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How Laser Therapy Can Help You Quit Smoking
When a person smokes, they inhale over four thousand toxic, carcinogenic chemicals into their bodies. The body needs to detoxify these chemicals as fast as it can to limit the damage. This detoxification process requires energy and the use of endorphins, so when a person smokes they are forcing their bodies to release stores of energy and endorphins.
Endorphins - such as serotonin and dopamine - are hormone-like chemicals that your body uses to modify your mood and energy levels. They typically elevate your mood and give you a pleasant sense of calm well-being. It can feel like mild euphoria. Endorphins can also relieve pain and inflammation, give you a sense of excitement, and boost your levels of self-esteem.
Non-smokers enjoy these endorphins and energy on a regular basis throughout the day, but smokers suffer because the smoking sabotages this process. After smoking ten, twenty, thirty or more cigarettes a day for several years, the body loses its ability to use these endorphins and energy naturally on its own without responding to the nicotine threat. That's why smokers get trapped into an addiction, because when they try to quit their bodies typically feel lousy for a few days as it struggles to relearn this otherwise natural process all over again.
This is where laser therapy comes to the rescue. Since the lasers help the body release endorphins without smoking, the person quitting won't experience the withdrawal discomfort or cravings as much as they would have otherwise. The treatments also help to calm and relax the person, relieving them from what typically would be a stressful experience. And since the treatments also tend to enhance the energy systems in the body, a person recovers from tobacco addiction more quickly than other means for quitting. These are just a few of the reasons why laser therapy works so well.
Development of Laser Therapy
Lasers have been used in medical procedures for over three decades, and they are being called upon for an ever increasing range of applications, from precision surgery to restoring good vision to stimulating cellular healing and the rejuvenation of tissue. New applications are constantly being explored and developed.
About thirty years ago it was discovered that certain types of lasers could be used to stimulate meridian points on the body, similar to acupuncture. This technique came to be known as laser therapy. In many applications, laser therapy was found to be more effective than traditional acupuncture.
Special techniques were developed to address specific ailments. One of the applications was to help people overcome addictions, and treating people for nicotine addiction in particular proved to be very effective. As pioneering laser therapists refined their techniques, they began to experience success rates approaching 85%, which is better than three times the rate of any other modality for treating tobacco addiction. Understandably, this is quite exciting, because no other method for smoking cessation, including medications, has ever sustained a success rate higher than 26%. Yet studies and clinical experience continue to indicate success rates with laser therapy that typically range from 43% to over 85%. This is good news if you want to finally quit smoking, and bad news for tobacco companies and anyone else who wants you to continue smoking.
While the efficacy rate is exciting, there are other appealing aspects of laser therapy: it’s drug-free, pain-free, absolutely safe, produces no side-effects, and demands very little time. Clearly, this qualifies as a viable and attractive solution for people who are tired of smoking and don't want to go through the side effects and expense of medications.
Most of the development of laser therapy has taken place in the United Kingdom, Sweden, Canada, and Switzerland. It is a relatively new concept in the United States, but within the past several years the FDA has approved the safety of the laser devices and allows laser therapy for smoking cessation to be practiced as clinical trials. As a result, many successful clinics like ours have opened up around America, helping over 1.2 million Americans quit smoking. Laser Wellness Center is delighted to bring this revolutionary new technology to your community.
Technique
Acupuncture, a highly refined system for addressing physiological issues, has identified channels of energy coursing through the body along with special meridian points along those channels that can be stimulated in certain combinations to induce specific physiological responses. For over 3,000 years this technique has been used to relieve all kinds of pain, improve digestion, stimulate the immune system, and restore good health - among many other things. It is believed that when meridian points are stimulated - traditionally with needles - the body and brain sense, interpret, and respond to these in different ways according to the specific combination of points that are stimulated. Some common responses include increasing or slowing the metabolism, improving circulation, lowering blood pressure, relaxing the body, and inducing a calm feeling of well-being.
Pioneers began experimenting with lasers as an alternative to needles, and discovered that lasers could be extremely effective in stimulating meridian points. There is a fundamental advantage that a therapeutic laser has over the strictly physical stimulation of needles. The laser is essentially focused energy with special qualities related to wavelength, energy density, pulsing rate, and even color. When this energy interacts with your cells, a sort of chemical reaction takes place known as photo-bio-stimulation (consider how plant cells interact with sunlight in the process of photosynthesis - creating food for the plant). This reaction can have a rejuvenating effect on the cells while stimulating the acupuncture point more effectively than needles.
The way your brain reacts to this stimulation is similar to a reflex - it's pre-programmed to respond in a certain way to certain stimulations. There are centers in your brain that manage such things as habits, addictions, cravings, desires, and so on. Stimulating the correct combination of points can cause the brain to stimulate or suppress such centers.
Another reaction is for the brain to instigate production of endorphins. These are your body's natural 'feel-good' chemicals. Any pleasurable sensation you experience - whether it's a result of receiving a compliment, earning a big raise, eating a good meal, making love, laughing with friends, etc - is accompanied by endorphins. Physiologically, endorphins promote good health, and psychologically they instill a sense of well-being.
Nicotine and other narcotics artificially stimulate the production of serotonin and dopamine - feel-good chemicals of the brain. We are naturally wired to seek out pleasure, and since the nicotine in cigarettes causes the release of pleasure-inducing endorphins, our brain makes the association that smoking cigarettes is desirable. As the action is repeated, the brain/body is conditioned to crave smoking. Typically the impulse quickly grows to a point where it becomes an addiction. Beyond this physical addiction, psychologically the action of putting the cigarette to the lips becomes a deeply ingrained habit.
A pattern develops as a person smokes throughout the day. Start smoking, and the endorphin levels in the brain go up, giving a smoker a 'high' sensation. After a while the endorphin-induced high subsides and the person 'comes back down'. Soon enough they begin to feel agitated and feel it's time for another cigarette. This pattern of 'highs' chasing 'lows' is very stressful on the body - and a hard habit to break.
Cigarette smoke is full of carbon monoxide (yes, the same gas in car exhaust that kills people on a regular basis). As a person smokes, the carbon monoxide levels in the blood increase, which deprives you of oxygen. This increase in carbon monoxide and decrease in oxygen suffocates every cell in the body and dulls normal cellular functioning. The smoker experiences this as calm, the same calm a person feels as they succumb to carbon monoxide poisoning. As the carbon monoxide leaves the body, cellular functions wake up again, sometimes overdoing it in an attempt to make up for the damage, and smokers can unfortunately experience this as anxiety in comparison to the previous calm.
When a person quits smoking, nicotine no longer threatens the body and the artificially-elevated endorphin levels drop. The body/brain feels comparably miserable as a result. It undergoes stress and irritability as it struggles to restore biochemical balance. There is no carbon monoxide to dull these sensations, so a person feels anxious and miserable. These are the dreaded withdrawal symptoms that accompany most attempts to quit smoking (or any other addiction).
That's where the laser comes in: by stimulating key meridian points your body begins producing endorphins again and you begin to feel better. Unlike the stimulation of endorphins in the brain by nicotine, which lasts less than twenty minutes, laser therapy triggers endorphin production in such a way that you feel the beneficial effects for up to several days.
The result is that you are spared the worst of withdrawal discomfort and the cravings that go with it. You may actually feel terrific after your very first laser treatment. Since your body isn't being ravaged by stressful mood swings and miserable withdrawal symptoms, your physical cravings for a cigarette are greatly reduced, and it will be easier for you to stay committed to your desire to be free at last.
To learn more or set up an appointment, simply call any of the following numbers.
Oak Creek: 414-433-4931 Germantown: 262-437-7347 Reedsburg: 608-332-6292
Or email us at: info@LaserWellnessCenter.com
Laser Wellness Center . . . Harnessing the Healing Power of Light
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