Quitting Smoking With Magnetic Stimulation

If you're having problems kicking your smoking habit, then perhaps you should put aside tactics such as nicotine patches and quitting cold turkey in favor of magnetic brain stimulation. Smokers are finding more and more techniques to help them give up their bad habit, such as the use of e-cigarettes or even nicotine gum as well as acupuncture, hypnosis, and behavioral therapy.

Regardless, the newest treatment to hit the smoking world is called high frequency transcranial magnetic stimulation or TMS for short. It works by stimulating the brain's nerve cells through magnetic waves. Many techniques for smoking recession result in relapse, so there's ongoing research to find better cures for this addiction.

According to the Medical University of South Carolina's Xingbao Li and his associates, 15-minute sessions of rTMS at the prefrontal cortex can temporarily reduce nicotine-induced smoking craving. In order to avoid relapse, something must change in the smoker's brain chemistry (since habits are formed by constant repetition and the creation of patterns etched into the brain's very synapses), which makes sense why repetitive TMS (rTMS) offers an even safer option for nicotine craving reduction among dependent smokers. Instead of weaning smokers from nicotine by giving them nicotine in decreasing doses, you can undergo TMS instead. In fact, the FDA has even approved the TMS treatment as a means depression treatment.