Two years ago, I started vaping to help treat a distressing side-effect of a medication I was taking at the time for depression, a side-effect called akathisia.
A desperate man in a desperate situation, after trying multiple drugs to treat this side effect, I found a scientific-paper showing that nicotine had helped others.
Not only did it not help me, it made my depression worse, and I was fully addicted in a week. I was vaping from morning to night, constantly craving more, and vaping in the toilets of restaurants.
At the time, I felt ashamed, guilty, and trapped. But now I’m free, I can see that I was trapped by the third most addictive drug known to science, exhibiting stereotypical behaviours of someone suffering from addiction.
This doesn’t mean lacking willpower, this means changes that have happened within the brain that lead you to do things you would never normally do. Addiction is a medical condition, and one that can be treated, and not something to be ashamed of.
It can happen to anyone, at anytime. Including Doctors.
My addiction to vaping continued for six months, at which point I decided I needed to quit. So I began my search for help. What I found, or didn’t find, deeply concerned me.
I started on the internet. I couldn’t find anything of decent quality that I believed what help me. It was either far too basic and lacking in anything of proven benefit, with nonsensical statistics I knew weren’t true, or inflated outcomes to get you to spend your money.
Then I turned to my local smoking cessation service, who didn’t have any knowledge or experience of vaping and were of little help at best.
I looked at mobile phone apps and found them all poorly designed, not created by healthcare professionals and mainly focused on tracking tools with no valuable content on how to navigate the withdrawal phase.
Does any of this sound familiar to you?
This is why I created this course: to fill the void in the scarcity of resources currently available to the people who are taking the brave step in reaching out for help, but are being let down by the lack of help currently available.
The course is designed to be completed in order, as it will help you understand your own problem points before moving on to how to successfully overcome them
Everything you need should be within the course, but in Module 6, there are some bonus resources available for download to help guide you along the way.
I hope you find this course useful, and I’ll be with you every step of the way.
Dr Marc Picot MRCGP
Founder, Vape Escape
GP | Health Coach | Ex-Vaper