Abstract

Objectives: The purpose of this study was to investigate the effective smoking cessation treatment in terms of Korean Medicine. Methods: Domestic and international articles regarding on the oriental medicine for smoking cessation were investigated through Pubmed, Korean studies Information Service System (KISS) and Google Scholar database. The keywords included ‘smoking’, ‘smoking cessation’, ‘oriental medicine’, ‘herbs’ and ‘therapy’. Firstly, each keyword were searched by combining each keyword approximately. Results: The current therapy for smoking cessation was described to compare with the alternative and complementary remedy. As result for searching keywords, the total number of papers searched was 83471 and final papers inspected was 61 after exclusion. We introduced various oriental medicine therapeutics including 3 herb formulation, 4 herbs and acupuncture based on the previous studies. Alternative and complementary remedy of oriental medicine for smoking cessation focused on the efficacy on the antioxidative activities, nicotine degradation activities and decrease of craving for tobacco. Conclusion: Because exposure of cigarette smoke induces severe health problems, effective smoking cessation would be necessary for smokers. Alternative and complementary therapies including herbs and acupuncture could be helpful to quit smoking over a long period of time without side effects.