Nearly 70 percent of adult smokers want to quit, and 52 percent have attempted to do so in the past year, according to data collected by the CDC as part of the 2001 to 2010 National Health Interview Surveys. But what ACSH's Dr. Gilbert Ross found most shocking about the survey results, which were published in the CDC s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, was that fewer than half the smokers who visited a health professional in the past year had been advised to quit.
When I wrote about this topic in an op-ed a few years ago, the survey found that only 63 percent of smokers recalled being advised to quit, says Dr. Ross. Instead of doctors having improved that inadequate level of care, the statistics show that it s worse now. I m always stunned to learn that physicians are not counseling their patients to quit. Health care professionals who neglect this important responsibility are, in my opinion, committing malpractice. He adds, Smoking is the most significant health behavior that is lethal yet modifiable. So for all the EKGs and MRIs and PSAs that doctors perform, the simplest thing they can do to improve the health of their patients is to tell them to quit, and offer them advice on how to do so.
Also of interest in the new report was that, out of the 52 percent of adults who had attempted to quit smoking over the past year, as well as those who had actually quit in the last two years, only 32 percent used counseling and/or medications as part of their efforts to quit. That means that most of smokers tried to quit cold turkey, observes Dr. Ross. Which, as we can see, is accompanied by dismal success rates. Indeed, only 6 percent of smokers in the survey had successfully stopped smoking.
The dismal statistics prompted ACSH s Dr. Elizabeth Whelan to interject, Maybe public health authorities, including the publisher of this report the CDC will come to accept the reality that we need more effective tools to help smokers quit methods such as clean nicotine and smokeless tobacco.
