Editorial policy
How the 81 articles and 14 calculators on this site are researched, sourced, updated and corrected — and the limits of what any of it can tell you.
Read this first
Everything on this site is information, not medical advice. It cannot account for your own health history, and it is not a substitute for a doctor, a nurse or a quit-smoking service. Nothing here is clinically reviewed — there is no clinician on staff — so instead every health claim carries the document it came from, in that document’s own words, and links to it so you can read the original.
If you are considering medication or nicotine replacement, or you have a heart or lung condition, talk to a doctor or your local quit line before you change anything. They can prescribe; a web page cannot.
Who writes this
One person: Zigmars Dzerve, who built the Burnout app and researches and writes the articles and the tool methods on this site. Every article carries the byline “By Zigmars Dzerve” and links back to his author page.
He is not a doctor, nurse, pharmacist or academic researcher, and this site does not dress him up as one. What he has is the work of building the app’s recovery model — nicotine and cotinine clearance, the withdrawal curve, the milestone timeline — which meant reading the primary literature closely enough to find out how much of the popular version of it is wrong. That is what the articles are: the documents, in plain language, with the links.
How a page gets written
- 1. Start from the question somebody actually asks. “How long does nicotine stay in my system”, “when do the cravings stop”, “is vaping better”. Not from a keyword list of things nobody says out loud.
- 2. Open the primary document. WHO, the NHS, the CDC, the 2020 Surgeon General’s report, or the peer-reviewed paper itself — never another blog, and never a summary of a blog. No URL is cited here that was not opened.
- 3. Carry the hedge the source carries. These bodies publish windows, not instants: WHO puts coughing easing across one to nine months, the CDC widens the same thing to one to twelve. Where a source says “up to” or “in some people”, so does this site. Dropping a hedge to make a sentence tidier is how a range becomes a promise.
- 4. Where the bodies disagree, print the disagreement. Four organisations give four different answers for when heart risk halves and when carbon monoxide clears. The pages here name all of them rather than picking the friendliest number and hiding the rest.
- 5. Where a number is ours, say so and cite nobody. Most constants on the calculators are ours: the vape absorption factors, the device weights, the withdrawal intensity curve, every phase boundary. Nobody publishes those, so nothing is cited for them — and the page says whose they are instead of borrowing authority for them.
- 6. Write out the arithmetic. Every calculator carries a “How this is worked out” section under the instrument itself, with its sources and the date it was last checked against the code. You are not asked to trust a number we will not explain.
The sources this site runs on
In rough order of how often they are used:
- World Health Organization — the benefits-of-cessation timeline and the windows it gives for each one.
- NHS Better Health — UK guidance, plain-language clinical advice, and the quit-smoking service behind it.
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — US population data and the revised cessation timeline.
- Smoking Cessation: A Report of the Surgeon General, 2020 — the long-horizon risk estimates, which are the ones most often misquoted.
- Peer-reviewed literature through PubMed and PubMed Central — nicotine pharmacokinetics, the Fagerström dependence test, and the trial evidence on quit-smoking apps, including the trials that found nothing.
One source this site does not lean on: the eight-anchor recovery timeline every quit-smoking page seems to print. It descends from a 2004 Surgeon General’s consumer poster which the CDC has since revised in several places and archived behind a staleness notice. Pages here do not claim that lineage as backing, and where our timings agree with it they agree because a current document says so.
What this site does not do
- It is not clinically reviewed. No doctor reads these pages before they go up. You will never see a “medically reviewed” badge here, because there is nobody behind one.
- It does not diagnose. The dependence quiz runs a published instrument and returns a published score. Only somebody qualified who can examine you can tell you what it means for you.
- It does not recommend medication. No doses, no brands, no telling you to start or stop a prescription. Where the honest advice at a given score is a conversation with a doctor, the page says that instead.
- It does not measure your body. Every clock on this site is elapsed time against a published offset. A milestone lighting up is a marker passing on a clock, and the page says so in those words — nothing here has measured anything about you.
- It does not replace a person. A doctor, a quit line, or somebody who wants you to get through this will always be worth more than an article.
Updates and corrections
Every article shows a “last updated” date beside the byline, and every calculator’s method note carries the day it was last checked against the code it describes. Those dates move when the page moves — not on a schedule, and never to look fresh.
Pages get reread when a cited body revises what it publishes, when guidance moves, or when somebody writes in to say a number is wrong. Where a note and the code behind it disagree, the code is right and the note is a bug — and it gets fixed as a bug.
Found something wrong, out of date or badly explained? Tell us — name the page and, if you have one, the source. A correction that changes what a page means gets a new update date.
Money and independence
This site is published by the people who make the Burnout app, and it exists partly to introduce people to it. We say so rather than pretending to be a neutral encyclopaedia that happens to have an app in the footer.
There are no display ads on any page here, no sponsored articles, and no paid placements in any comparison. The pages that weigh other quit-smoking apps against ours carry no affiliate links — we earn nothing if you pick one of them, which is the only reason a comparison like that is worth reading. Where the trial evidence on cessation apps is weak, those pages say it is weak, including about this category and about us.
If you want real help quitting
- Talk to a doctor or a pharmacist. Medication and nicotine replacement are things only they can arrange, and the app evidence on this site’s own comparison pages reads better alongside them than on its own.
- Your local quit line or stop-smoking service. In the UK that is NHS Better Health; elsewhere, your health service will name the one that covers you.
- If something feels medically wrong — chest pain, breathlessness that is new, anything frightening — that is not a question for a quit-smoking site. Call your local emergency number.
Questions about this policy
Write to us on the contact page. See also the privacy policy and the terms. The 81 articles sit under 9 topics; the calculators are in tools.