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Therapy helps smokers stub out a habit hard to break |
| Posted by (mike) on Apr 12 2007 at 3:15 PM |
Therapy helps smokers stub out a habit hard to break by MARTIN LENON
THE majority of smokers would like to give up. They all have reasons why they started and why they find it difficult to stop. Although the recent legislation has given them added motivation to quit, many still have trouble kicking the habit.
Most have tried one or more methods of giving up the weed, and they can come up with plenty of reasons why their attempts failed. I know, because I'm one of those smokers, with 35 years of coughing and spluttering my way through a couple of packs a day.
Acupuncture, hypnosis, patches - even the Allen Carr method - I've tried them all, and while the latter had an effect, I'm still a smoker.
So I got excited when I saw a television news broadcast about Bioresonance therapy last year. I looked for the website, booked a session and found myself in Croyden in September, holding on to two metal orbs, listening to relaxing music and a soothing voice, hoping against hope that this would be it - no more fags.
They don't claim a 100 per cent success rate, no-one does. However, as company boss Savita Bhandari says: "We're getting a 70 per cent success rate after a single treatment and 90 per cent after two treatments."
In my case, after just one session, for the first time I can remember I didn't want a cigarette, and after half an hour wasn't even thinking about them.
The procedure has been around since the 1950s, but until recently it had been used to treat allergies and other medical conditions.
A Polish doctor discovered it could be used to help people stop smoking, and Ms Bhandari, a member of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, found out about the treatment while practising nutritional medicine.
"You can use it for many things. It can help with pain, inflammation, detoxification - you can treat liver, kidneys, lymph glands with it," she says.
One area in particular interested her though. "A lot of us are aware that food allergies are a big problem. The reason for this is that so many have compromised stomachs, because of what we consume. The immune system gets affected - 70 per cent of that is in our stomach lining, which is where the allergies come in."
She continues: "Normally, small food molecules are digested and absorbed, but when the stomach lining is compromised, larger molecules get through - especially dairy and wheat which are harder to break down. The body sees them as foreign toxins. This creates an allergic response, to one degree or another."
Bioresonance addresses these problems. "If we can detoxify the body through Bioresonance and nutrition, we can make it stronger and build up the immune system. Then the body is capable of healing itself," Ms Bhandari says.
The physics of Bioresonance are complicated, but Ms Bhandari tries to simplify it. "Everything has an electromagnetic energy pattern and the machines we use can measure that pattern," she says. As far as the fags are concerned, that means "we can measure the pattern of nicotine present in someone's body and represent it as a sine wave - because energy travels in waves.
"Using the machines we can invert that wave and send it back to the body. You then get what's called phase cancellation - one cancels the other out."
To simplify it further, she adds: "It's a technique DJs and musicians use to get rid of unwanted sound or noise on records or CDs or in a music PA system."
It's not quite as simple as being connected to the machinery, though. "A great deal of it is to do with our therapists and also it's to do with how the smoker prepares for it," Ms Bhandari says.
"The preparations are simple, obvious things, but they do have to be carried out. "Bioresonance kick-starts the process, but you give it more chance of succeeding by taking supplements and eating certain foods and avoiding others.
"You should naturally eat more fresh fruit and vegetables, and give up coffee and tea, in particular, for at least a week before the treatment."
As ever with detoxification, water also plays a part. "It's very important to drink at least two litres of water a day. More, if possible," Ms Bhandari says.
Of course, I tried to do all of that before heading down south, but being as big a coffee drinker as well as a smoker, I wasn't quite as pure as I should have been.
Despite that though, I still managed to feel the effects of the treatment - at least until the evening when I lit up. This wasn't a craving, and when I took that first puff there was no sense of relief.
I have no idea why I had that cigarette - maybe it was psychological - but it put me firmly in the 30 per cent of those who fail at the first attempt.
Yet I have found that I smoke less than I used to. And there's no problem in pubs or friends' houses. I just don't smoke there. But I still want to give up.
So far, Bioresonance has appealed to a wide variety of smokers - a grandmother who smoked cannabis, truck drivers, accountants and even journalists.
But Ms Bhandari emphasises it's not just smokers who have benefited from the treatment. "I was employing this therapy, together with nutrition, to help relieve all kinds of problems like eczema, asthma and irritable bowel syndrome.
"Crohn's disease was one of the worst things I've treated, and I thought, my goodness, it can even help this, too."
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