BMJ blog article

[kate]

This might be of interest. It's by Patrick Basham who wrote the letter to the Times some of us responded to recently:

The DoH is wrong about cessation

I’m very disappointed in the section on cessation contained within the UK Department of Health’s new tobacco control strategy. There are several problems with the DoH’s ideas on cessation (and I’ll have more to say about them in future posts), but one of the most significant is its claims about how to quit smoking most successfully.

The strategy document says, “Those who are most successful in quitting use a combination of behavioural and medicinal support.” (p. 11) The only support for this rather extraordinary assertion is an unpublished report by West entitled, “The smoking pipe: a model of inflow and outflow of smokers in England.” But this source, which is a single page spreadsheet, provides little support for the claim about cessation. More troubling is that the DoH’s claim about the best way to quit smoking fails the most basic test of evidence-based medicine: it is contradicted by much of the published literature...

digg.com/d31Maca


Dr Siegel has a blog post about this article too:

digg.com/d31MvtU


And while I'm here I'll mention this unrelated but interesting video - Protect the Children from Anti-Smokers:

digg.com/d31Mw0c

[Chrissie]

Thanks Kate Only a flying visit at the moment, but will come back & read/digg later.

[Scylla]

That's the kind of person we need to front our "campaign"

scylla

[Chrissie]

All dugg & dusted

[foxy9212]

I'd like to know how the 'successful' quitters' figures are arrived at. No one ever asked me (except for the pharmasist who asked how I was getting on with the Nicorette Inhalator - I told him I'd set fire to it and he almost bust-a-gut laughing along with the rest of the queue at the counter!), so how is it ascertained who has been successful, for how long and how many so called 'quitters' start smoking again?
I only know of one 'successful' quitter and that was my mother who never wanted to stop smoking and missed her cigs to the end of her days - oh how she would have loved vaping! My son used patches and 'gave up' cigarettes but he now smokes small cigars so not much benefit there - incidentally no one followed up his progress with the patches. My father was ordered to give up his 60 a day Rothmans habit only to replace it with a pipe that was, like the eternal flame, always lit.

I am truly dreading the implementation of this ban!

Fox

[Chrissie]

Foxy, I bet they only ask a small percentage & then after only a few months.