William D. Yarbrough, MD FACC was born and grew up in South Carolina. He attended the Medical University of SC and obtained an MD in 1994. After graduation, he matched to UT Southwestern Medical Center and completed his medicine residency. Dr. Yarbrough furthered his medical training with a cardiovascular disease fellowship followed by an interventional cardiology fellowship at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical center. He completed this training in 2005 and moved back to Charleston, SC. He is board certified in internal medicine, cardiovascular diseases, and interventional cardiology. He is currently practicing general cardiology and is maintaining certification in cardiovascular diseases. He is also a principal investigator for multiple international clinical drug and device trials.
Dr. Yarbrough’s passion for tobacco and nicotine cessation grew after 20 years of practicing interventional cardiology. He continued to notice that almost every patient who was having the large, very dangerous ECG changing heart attack was an active nicotine user, especially the patients under 65 years old. It is well known that tobacco is a cause of heart attacks, but the degree to which it causes heart attacks most people underestimate. The reason people use tobacco is for the drug nicotine. Dr. Yarbrough believes the United States healthcare system has too much emphasis and focus on treatment of disease and not enough emphasis on the prevention of disease. Having a patient stop nicotine addiction is profoundly difficult. Chantix was approved by the FDA in 2006 for the assistance of tobacco and nicotine cessation. Multiple scientific clinical trials demonstrated this benefit. Dr. Yarbrough personally noticed the very powerful benefit of this medication with his patients who were trying to quit nicotine. Dr. Yarbrough became a promotional speaker for the Pfizer pharmaceutical company for the drug Chantix from 2006 to 2009. Since 2009, Dr. Yarbrough has no financial relationship with Pfizer. In 2009 Pfizer temporarily stopped promoting Chantix due to possible concern for side effects from post marketing surveillance reports. The FDA placed a black box warning on the medication due to these concerns and asked Pfizer to perform a very large international clinical trial to further evaluate these possible side effects and further assess the risk and benefit of Chantix. This trial was called the EAGLES trial and the results were published in the Lancet on April 22, 2016. This trial demonstrated Chantix was scientifically the best way to quit nicotine and was a safe medicine. The black box warning was removed by the FDA in 2016. This misunderstanding of the benefits and risks of Chantix still exists today. Patients inadvertently blame the severe nicotine withdrawal symptoms of nicotine on Chantix rather than on the nicotine withdrawal as the cause of these symptoms. Extremely few patients and a large portion of physicians are unaware of this correlation and not causation. In other words, you are more likely to have the severe nicotine withdrawal symptoms because you are more likely to quit nicotine with Chantix.
The purpose of this website and this information campaign is to educate nicotine users of the extreme danger of using nicotine. Nicotine itself is bad. Dr. Yarbrough believes nicotine is similar to cocaine and should not be thought of as a caffeine. The other purpose is to present ways to quit nicotine especially by using Chantix. The Chantix patent expired in 2021 and is now only available by its generic, Varenicline. Dr. Yarbrough believes this is great news to have this medication more affordable with the generic. The tobacco companies are again trying to profit financially by confusing the issue of nicotine and have another generation of young people addicted to nicotine by other nicotine delivery devices such as vaping that they sell. Tobacco and nicotine are now the # 1 cause of preventable death for the world and quitting should be our greatest focus.
