There is no ‘them’ and ‘us’ when it comes to smoking. It affects all of us.
As an ex-smoker I truly understand the ease in which smoking can change from a casual fling to a full blown addiction. And I know how very, very difficult it is to give it up.
But as a health professional, I have seen the damage that smoking can do.
Therefore, I’d like to recommend that everyone have a read of this free e-book Toward a Tobacco Free World, written by by Kaiser Permanente psychiatrist and UCLA researcher Dr. Michael Rabinoff.  It not only highlights the societal costs worldwide …read more

Bad for your health and bad for the environment.
But for some reason that doesn’t seem to deter the one billion or so people around the world who smoke.
Governments have tried to encourage smoker’s to stop with ‘quit smoking’ programs. Many countries and cities have banned smoking from inside public buildings. But unfortunately that has resulted in increased cigarette litter outside the same buildings that ban smoking.
So what to do? The World Health Organization has designated today World No Tobacco Day and are focusing on health warnings on tobacco product packaging as a way of encouraging smokers to quit.
But does it …read more

Today is the American Cancer Society’s Great American Smokeout, an annual event that has been held for the last three decades. with the aim of encouraging smokers to quit by providing information, support, and resources.
An ex-smoker myself, I know how very, very difficult it is to give it up. But I also know the up side of giving up the smokes and I’d encourage anyone who has been thinking about giving up cigarrettes to stop thinking and act.  You’ll thank yourself in the end.
Healthbolt already has a fairly active support system going on at the comment section of a post – …read more

That’s what the Cochrane Collaboration, an international organization that evaluates medical research, wanted to find out. So they did a systematic review of 17 relevant studies that had taken place in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia.
These studies had used mostly monetary incentives to help encourage participants to quit smoking.
Incentives such as …
- being rewarded with one lottery ticket per day if they tossed their cigarettes down the toilet.
- being offered cash incentives of $10 per month and participation in a monthly worksite lottery.
- being offered cash prizes ranging from $100 to $250, along with certificates of …read more

In a study set to be published in the New England Journal of Medicine on Thursday, researchers have found that quitting smoking is more often a group decision, rather than individual. What kind of group, you ask? A social group.
That’s right, according to the study, smokers tend to quit more in groups, or clusters, rather than on their own.
From 1971 to 2003, Dr. Nicholas Christakis of Harvard Medical School and James Fowler from the University of California, San Diego, followed thousands of smokers and nonsmokers, concentrating on studying participants as part of a “network” of relatives, co-workers, neighbors, friends …read more