Since there are two types of addictions that have to be overcome when stopping smoking, it usually requires that the individuals use more than one system to help them stop smoking.

There are stop smoking patches that help with the withdrawal symptoms while the individuals work in groups or programs on the mental addiction to nicotine. These stop smoking patches give the nicotine in measured doses through the skin so that the people can gradually use lesser doses of the patches to wean off of the nicotine as he works through the mental aspects of it.

Use of Patches

When starting on a stop smoking patch, individuals usually work with their doctors to determine what dose to start with according to the amount that the people smoked. Usually a light smoker is someone who only smokes about ten cigarettes per day as opposed to a heavy smoker who is a person who smokes more than a pack per day. There is also the term ‘pack year’ that doctors will use to determine how long and how much the people have smoked over the years. If a person smokes a pack per day for an entire year, then that is considered a pack year.

For someone who is a light to average smoker, the usually starting place in stop smoking patches is to use a sixteen hour patch, which means it can be worn for sixteen hours to release the nicotine into the system. This is a great system because it is basically one patch per day, since the other eight hours will be spent in sleep. Since this is a slow release system, it is less likely to have side effects than the other systems that require more frequent replacements. There are also twenty-four hour patches that are used, but these often have side effects in the sleeping patterns that the people have.

The weaning process that is typically followed with the stop smoking patches is four weeks on a full strength patch, four weeks on a weaker patch and so on until no patch is used. Most of the time the stop smoking patch is used for about three to five months, depending on how much the person smoked beforehand, with heavy smokers often taking more time to wean off the nicotine.