[CASE] Quite Smoking by Acupuncture

Outline
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​The patient is a male in 30s who wants to quit smoking. He has been smoking a pack of strong cigarettes a day for 17 years. He can’t smoke during work so he smokes during lunch time and after going back home. He is eager to smoke when he is relaxed. His other symptoms are stress, difficulty to fall asleep and stiffness and sometimes pain in his left upper back.
 
At the beginning, he had 2 treatments a week and then once-a-week or once-in-2-weeks treatments depending on his work schedule. The treatment included ear acupuncture for smoking cessation and whole body treatment. He gradually reduced the number of cigarettes he smoked a day and after the 11th treatment, the number became zero and on the 12th treatment, he was not smoking for about 3 weeks. During the series of treatments, he spent his vacation with his friends who smoked and he smoked more at that time, but he didn’t feel like he wanted to smoke so much and could go back to the planned number of cigarettes easily.

Update (12/9/2016): When his wife visited me for treatment recently, she told me that he had not smoked for more than 4 months after the last treatment with me.
 
Treatment Detail
 
Root Treatment: The first half of the treatments were mostly Spleen deficiency and Yin was tonified, and the latter half was mostly Liver deficiency and Yin was tonified. But I think the pattern was more related to other symptoms.
 
Local Treatment: For smoking cessation, I used 4 points on the ear. I retained needles for 15 minutes there and after the treatment, I attached press balls on some of the points which seemed effective (made his pulse better). Other treatments were touching needles with Teishin on his back, legs and neck and spreading needles with Ja Teishin on some tight area on his back.
 
Consideration
I think smoking cessation points on the ear are effective, but if only these points are used for the treatment, the patient has to come more often to control the desire to smoke. So it is necessary to have whole body treatment including Root Treatment in order to relax their mind and body and make the effect of the treatment last longer.
 
There was another patient who had the almost same process to reduce the number of cigarettes. In his case, he could reduce it to 1 or 2 cigarettes a day, but he couldn’t completely quit smoking because I think he really didn’t want to quit smoking. So I think, to quit the last 1-2 cigarettes, will power is desperately needed.

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