Healthline Blogs
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Advice on using over-the-counter nicotine replacement therapy.
Surveys have shown that many smokers (incorrectly) do not believe that nicotine replacement therapy helps smokers to quit. Many also believe NRT can cause cancer (again incorrectly). Unfortunately the labeling on the NRT product packaging also use...
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How Bad Is Smoking For Health?
Almost 20 years ago when I started my first job in tobacco research, I told my new boss that I’d like to get a sense of whether smoking really was so bad for health. I asked him if he could give me something to read to help me understand the healt...
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"Lost" and FDA Regulation of Tobacco
Last night I watched an excellent episode of the TV series, “Lost.” In it, a man named Ben who is the (sociopathic?) leader of one group of people trapped on a lost island, managed to get one of the members of the island’s opposing group (a man na...
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The Tobacco Atlas (3rd Edition)
Today I received my 2009 copy of The Tobacco Atlas (3rd edition). This an excellent and comprehensive report that maps the history, documents the current situation, and predicts the future of the tobacco epidemic.For tobacco geeks like myself it...
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U.S. Healthcare Reform
I’ve been bemused by the debate on healthcare reform taking place in the U.S. right now. I used to thing that the single topic that people talk the most nonsense about is sport. You know, my sport is better than your sport, my team is better than ...
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Quitting Together
We have been discussing the possibility of offering an online quit program that would be available through this blog. The idea would be for us to develop a community that will quit together. We would be sharing experiences, motivating and supporti...
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Do women find it harder to quit smoking?
This past week I attended the annual meeting of the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco, so I thought I’d share with you some of the new findings presented at the meeting. There was a lot of new research addressing the differences between...
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Debunking myths about self-quitting (1989): a classic study.
Every now and again I’d like to pick a classic research study from the past which shaped our understanding of smoking cessation. Today I’m going to focus on a paper by Dr Sheldon Cohen and 16 other researchers (recognized experts in the field 20 y...
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Great American Smokeout: a great day for clinicians to help patients quit.
This Thursday, November 19th is the 2009 “Great American Smokeout”. This is a day that has been set up by the American cancer Society as one day each year for all smokers to try to quit, and to make it last for at least the whole day. Of course, t...
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The World's Largest Quit Smoking Program
What do you think about quitting with 100,000 people from 89 different countries? If you are not quite ready to quit, this course (https://www.stopsmoking.ucsf.edu/en/Intro/Home.aspx)probably isn't for you. But if you are ready to give quitting a ...
