Smoking treatment for tobacco addiction needs integrated steps.
* Smoking treatment requires smokers to join together with their doctors, families, spouses, friends, and even employers, to successfully quit smoking. * Quitting is not easy. Every year, 34% of all smokers try to quit, however, only approximately 2.5% succeed. Nonetheless, 1 million Americans succeed to quit smoking every year. * Smoking treatment consists of 2 broad fields.
- – The medical problems caused by smoking such as respiratory illness, heart disease, circulatory disease, cancer, and ulcers, all require treatment.
- – The nicotine addiction also requires treatment. This generally consists of a combination of the following treatments:
- * Nicotine replacement therapy (gum, patch, inhaler, or nasal spray): Nicotine patches can be purchased at drug stores without prescriptions, but are best used in under a physician’s care.
- * Your physician may prescribe bupropion (Zyban or Wellbutrin), which is a prescription drug.
- * Smoking treatment group or behavioral counseling. The best quitting programs use some mixture of smoking withdrawal treatment and counseling and have success rates of 5% after 1 year.
* Smokers attempting to quit require lots of support and encouragement to help them deal with the inevitable desires to light up.
* Physicians, although trained in the diagnosis and treatment of smoking-related illnesses, may be less comfortable in undertaking the counseling and drug treatment smokers required to quit.
- – Physicians may not know about quit-smoking clinics servicing the area.
- – To locate a quit-smoking clinic, contact your local chapter of the American Lung Association.
* Smoking treatment programs are often not covered by health insurance plans.
- – This does not encourage hospitals, clinics, and other health care institutions to establish stop-smoking programs.
- – Smoking treatment programs may be partially reimbursed by your employer. A typical stop-smoking program costs less than $500, which equals the cost of approximately 150 packs of cigarettes. When considering the gains of increased productivity caused by fewer absences from work, and decreased use of health care resources, smoking treatment programs can certainly be cost-effective to your employer.
