What is "ATC"? I can't puzzle it out to save my life!
I mostly quit going to doctors, because of my lack of insurance -- and I'm quite sure the avoidance of doctors is responsible for my general good health.
Andria
Vaping for nicotine advantages?
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What is "ATC"? I can't puzzle it out to save my life!
I mostly quit going to doctors, because of my lack of insurance -- and I'm quite sure the avoidance of doctors is responsible for my general good health.
Andria
I believe he meant Air Traffic Controller.What is "ATC"? I can't puzzle it out to save my life!
Andria
Ohh! Sorry... my brain is fully occupied this morning by the damage done last night when that branch fell on the house then rolled onto the electric wires, and pulled it halfway out of our house.
Andria
Mosspa, I am interested in hearing your thought on this small study. I found it interesting, but am not convinced that in a larger study, gender brain function would not be that defined. I think some of us are wired a little differently.
YaleNews | Smoking lights up brain
Another question I have for you is your opinion on food grade verses pharmaceutical grade PG or VG, as it related to "inhalation toxicity".
I buy my PG from the pharmacy but it seems to be a "cosmetic grade" maybe. There seems to be a difference, I assume in purity between that sold in 500 ml bottles and 473 ml bottles. A compounding pharmacy wanted $50 for 500 ml of pharmacy grade.
One bottle I have even says "Federal law prohibits dispensing without a prescription". Your thoughts?
YaleNews | Smoking lights up brain
Another question I have for you is your opinion on food grade verses pharmaceutical grade PG or VG, as it related to "inhalation toxicity".
I buy my PG from the pharmacy but it seems to be a "cosmetic grade" maybe. There seems to be a difference, I assume in purity between that sold in 500 ml bottles and 473 ml bottles. A compounding pharmacy wanted $50 for 500 ml of pharmacy grade.
One bottle I have even says "Federal law prohibits dispensing without a prescription". Your thoughts?
I started smoking again a few years back for the mental health benefits now vaping again. My undergrad was biology and psychology and I did fairly extensive research on Nicotine for many of my classes. Overall, the most interesting factoid I found was the 5-httlpr serotonin allelic variants demonstrated a statistically significant difference to Nicotine. I believe individuals with the short receive much higher benefits than individuals with the long version.
I read an interesting book called "How We Decide". The author used gambling as an example, think Pavlov's dog and that we like to be right. The addictive behavior (pulling on the arm of the slot machine) was in anticipation of an expected outcome.
He profiled a woman who started gambling obsessively, seemingly out of the blue, and subsequently lost her house, kids, husband...
IIRC, It turned out to be a chemical reaction from a med she had been prescribed.
I keep sucking on this ecig expecting it to give me what cigarettes did. It really doesn't, but I keep trying.
Well, in the model that I have developed here, you would be said to have successfully substitutring the 'smoking' habit for a 'vaping' habit. Because of the topographical similarities between smoking behavior and vaping behavior, it is very easy for your brain to accept this substitution. In a way this is a miracle (depending, of course, on how you define miracle).
It's more complicated than that because of the possible introduction of a reverse placebo effect. That is, having an expectancy that nicotine may be producing the anti-withdrawal effect for you may contribute to the overall behavioral effect you are experiencing, and knowing that you are vaping juice with no nicotine might produce the reverse placebo effect. The only way to test this would be to use a double blind procedure where neither you nor the person supplying the juice knew the nicotine concentration. Then, yes, the non-nicotine juice should produce the desired effect, to the extent that nicotine is involved in the reinforcement sequelae of the whole smoking behavior reinforcement chain. However, there is one additional thing that needs to be considered, and that is whether or not the contingencies of the reinforcement of vaping behavior have changed for the 'vaping' habit. It could be that nicotine gained some positive valence as a reinforcer when the habit became substituted. This could be caused by a difference in the physiological effects of cigarette smoke and e-cig vapor, or a difference in psychological effects (e.g., accepting that nicotine in the vapor is instrumental in reduction of withdrawal symptoms). It is entirely possible that nicotine could have more reinforcer strength in vaping. Independent from the possibility of some kinds of withdrawal symptoms (i.e., that I would contend are mostly psychologically caused), weaning to 0mg nicotine should be very doable in a reasonably short period of time (i.e., days).
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Again, I draw you to what I said about a reverse placebo effect. You do not, nor ever will, fully understand what your brain has done with the information that, for whatever reason, you believe that nicotine participated in your 'addiction'. However since you roll your own, why not just try it and find out?
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I read something about this long/short allele situation as it related to all addictive behavior (a fundamental of my life it seems!). Very interesting stuff!!!
Andria
I can feel nic in my body. I can feel whether there is more or less of it. It's mildly pleasurable most of the time even if the sensation is fairly subtle. If it starts to decline and I want more is that because nic is causing some special chemical reaction called withdrawal symptoms or am I simply self indulgent or conditioned to feel some anxiety to justify the indulgence? Vaping with higher or lower amounts of nic doesn't seem to inflluence how much I vape. I tend to chain vape when that's possible even though I can go for hours without vaping without much discomfort. May be I just let myself be a spoiled 2 year old when it comes to vaping (or smoking).
The best procedure for those unsure what to try next when using an ecig but still getting cravings is:
1. Increase the nic strength of your ecig refills to a point where you begin to feel unpleasant effects.
Unless you first do this, the possibility exists that you simply aren't getting enough nicotine. When you get to that point (say it's 24mg), then back off one step, down to 18mg. That's where you need to be for maintenance. A stronger refill can be used in the morning, and a weaker one in the late evening.
2. If this is still unsatisfactory (you still experience cravings), then try WTA refills as well.
3. Alternatively, try dual-use with Snus.
4. If all else fails, just cut down gradually on daily cigarettes smoked. Target #1 is 1 cigarette per day, and if you can reach this stage then eventual success is assured. Some would also say that you don't really need to go any further. Target #2 is 1 cigarette per week, and if you can reach this, it probably won't be too long till you forget to smoke.
This is a general procedure that works for almost everyone. Those left after #3 are people who are chemically dependent on odd compounds or pyrolytic products such as carbon monoxide (yes, this has been implicated), and these less common dependencies can usually be beaten in time if you can stay with it. Option #4 is successful for many and should not be discounted: more probably use this than #2 or #3, as it's a lot simpler for those with limited motivation.
The reason this process is used is that someone vaping who still gets cravings almost certainly has some form of residual chemical dependency, since all other aspects are well-replicated. The challenge is to find what it is.
What is "ATC"? I can't puzzle it out to save my life!
I mostly quit going to doctors, because of my lack of insurance -- and I'm quite sure the avoidance of doctors is responsible for my general good health.
Don't be so sure
Well, the main reason for not using a patch is that nicotine may may be only tangentially related to the smoking habit. Most clinical studies conclude that the patch is pretty much worthless in the absence of some kind of support system or psychological therapy.
It's not cravings. I picked up an NJOY Pro April, 21 2009, and didn't touch a cigarette for 9 months.
The problem is my brain didn't work the same. Then I tried snus, and that didn't do it. When I finally bought a pack of analogs, I suddenly started getting some things done again. Things that I had been just ignoring. When they talk about depression, and not finding enjoyment in things you used to enjoy. That's me! For most of the last 6 years.
See, they still only sell cigarettes in packs of 20, so I smoke 1-2 a day for about 2 days and if I'm dual use, I'm back to a pack a day, single use, it's 2 p/d, in a week, just like the good old days. That's my set point.
When 36 was "high" I hit it occasionally, but never tried it as an all day vape. I just bought it to cut.
I'm gonna give high nic a try and see what happens.
At this point, I have nothing to lose.
Simple/English version
Alleles are different genetic blocks for expressing essentially same biological traits. They are the reason people have different hair color, skin color, gain weight easy, and etc. Serotonin is a significant neurotransmitter, and this system has a short and long version allele. Think of it like a regular vs an director's version of a movie. Well the short version obviously is missing some data as compared to the long version. This leads to differences in physiological response to chemicals.
Overall, there are numerous alleles for many different things. Alleles are the genetic driving factor for evolution and natural selection. Allelic differences explain why people respond differently to medications at a biochemical level.
Yep, the research is out there, although it is pretty hard to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Seems that only very recently, researchers are looking at nicotine itself, without falling into the all-too-common trap of associationg nicotine-smoking-tobacco-bad .
And that is exactly what is sorely needed. Objective, unbiased research with onle one item on the agenda: Let's find out first, then mull over the implications.
Lots of older papers ( did a quick run one the search engines ) still lumos noctoine and tobacco and smoking together.
Seems that only very recently, researchers are looking at nicotine itself, without falling into the all-too-common trap of associationg nicotine-smoking-tobacco-bad .
And that is exactly what is sorely needed. Objective, unbiased research with onle one item on the agenda: Let's find out first, then mull over the implications.
Lots of older papers ( did a quick run one the search engines ) still lumos noctoine and tobacco and smoking together.
As for the study, it seems reasonable. There have been a lot of differences reported between sexes in how things are processed by the brain. The biggest problem with this study is that it is based on the idea that nicotine is responsible for the activity they are measuring. Since they haven't isolated nicotine they have no way of knowing what is causing the effect. Any number of things associated with smoking behavior could account for it, even the completion of one chain of smoking behavior, itself (i.e., which would be what I would argue without seeing some convincing data to the contrary).
Yes, that is an incredibly good question, and one that I can attempt to answer based on my experiences. If you have read about my personal experiences and decisions in this thread you will realize that I am different than most people who read this forum. When I started vaping last December, I had not smoked a cigarette in about 42 years. When I was between 32 and 45 I was in the best physical condition of my life and I try to continue to maintain a healthy lifestyle. As I aged to my present age of 60 I started noticing little cognitive defects that I didn't like. I found myself to pause more during oral presentations, and I found the occurrence of 'senior moments' seemed to introduce themselves into my well rehearsed lectures. I was never convinced that nicotine was particularly toxic (because it really isn't at any reasonable level one might attain by vaping), and due to my reading of the scientific literature and from experiments I performed in my research laboratories on rat models of dependence, I was also convinced that 'nicotine addiction' is a myth. Also, the links between cancer and nicotine have never been demonstrated to exist, so, if I didn't spend the last 16 years of my pre-academic career directing a major government toxicology lab with a sophisticated inhalation toxicology capability, I probably would have started vaping as soon as the e-cig was invented (circa 2008?). It took up to last December for me to actually try inhaling nicotine-laced vapors because I was concerned about the effects of deeply inhaling small atomized particles of ANYTHING into my lungs. I tried to apply lung models developed at the lab to the particles of propylene glycol and glycerol inhaled during vaping but I could never come to any firm conclusion. What enabled my first vaping was constant scrutiny of the epidemiology of vaping for adverse effects in lung toxicity endpoints, including irritation, blood oxygenation, and onset of COPD-like symptoms, and not finding any. My reasoning was that by the end of 2014, the overall population of vapers would be large enough for those kinds of adverse effects to start showing up if they were, in fact, there. That they hadn't gave me the green light to start vaping.
Now, to answer your question (and this is only my answer given my biases). Back to purity of lifestyle, the way I see it is: why introduce complicating variables like contaminants in juice into a prognosis situation that is still somewhat unknown. The USP grades reagents by levels of various contaminants in representative sampled batches. So, for whatever juice mixture I brew, I try to limit the impurities as best I can. So, for PG and VG I purchase only pharmaceutical grade alcohols, since these are the ones that have been used for decades in pharmaceutics, even in inhalers, without respiratory incident. Additionally, I use only pharmaceutical grade nicotine, because there are many known detrimental contaminants from various processing and oxidizing events that can result in plant extraction/distillation processes. As I said, I started using Vuse e-cigs from Winston-Reynolds because, believe it or not, I trusted the product to contain what the spectroanalyses the company was providing the government indicated they contained, in it's attempt to conquer the vaping market. The sprctrographs were pretty clean and they served to ease my paranoid mind
Since then, I have found one vape company that I will consistently use in the future, if for no other reason than my trust of the purity of their juices, alcohols, and nicotine (they even advertize the fact that they use pharmaceutical grade nicotine and why). The company I use is MyFreedomSmokes.com. However, I've only been at this for about 3 months, and my overall knowledge of vaping products available is somewhat lacking. I'm sure there are other suppliers of equally-pure stuffs out there, I just haven't looked for them because I'm satisfied with MFS. Note: I don't even including flavorings in my juices because I view them as additional contaminants. There isn't any truly empirical reason for me to believe the way I do, but it makes me sleep easier. Experience would suggest, however, that to err on the side of caution is probably a good thing.
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