(RxWiki News) Quitting smoking is no easy task. New efforts from the CDC and major physicians groups have been striving to help empower smokers to quit once and for all.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have teamed up with five national physician groups to campaign for smoking cessation in the US.
The new TV and online campaign ads will air national between May 27th and June 2nd.
"Talk to your doctor for help quitting smoking."
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have teamed up with Surgeon General Regina Benjamin, MD, to promote a campaign to encourage smokers to engage their doctors for help with quitting.
“Taking just a few minutes to talk to your patients about smoking can double the odds of them successfully quitting,” Dr. Benjamin said in a CDC press release.
“As a physician, I know that clinicians and their staff can play an incredibly important role in helping smokers move from thinking about quitting to taking real steps toward successful quitting,” continued Dr. Benjamin.
The “Talk With Your Doctor” campaign, which will include national TV and online advertisements, was designed to prompt smokers to make use of resources from the medical community to put an end to their smoking.
The tagline for the ad campaign will be, “You can quit. Talk with your doctor for help.”
“Smokers have told us that hard-hitting, emotionally powerful ads like these provide the motivation they need, and the response to the ads supports that. We believe ‘Talk With Your Doctor’ will amplify and expand the great success of Tips and offer more encouragement for smokers to quit for good,” said CDC Director Tom Frieden, MD, MPH.
Dr. Frieden continued that the CDC hopes the medical community will deliver both the types of counseling that have been proven to work in previous trials and prescription medications to all smoking patients that could be helped to quit.
The CDC partnered with five national physician groups to develop and implement the “Talk With Your Doctor” campaign. The physician groups include the American Medical Association (AMA), the American Academy of Physicians, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Physicians and the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.
Part of the campaign efforts will make tobacco intervention training available to the medical community. In addition, the campaign will further spread its message through newsletters, academic journals and online resources.
Researchers at the CDC published data from the National Health Interview Survey in 2011, which found that nearly 70 percent of smokers in the US said they wanted to quit smoking.
The CDC estimated that 43 million adults in America still smoke despite nearly 50 years of medical research on the dangers of smoking. The CDC has estimated that roughly 440,000 people in America die from smoking-related illness every single year.
Many insurance plans offer prescription coverage for smoking cessation medications, which can run between $0 and $250 per month depending upon location and coverage.
The national smoking cessation hotline can be reached at 1-800-QUIT-NOW.
This study was published in May in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report on the CDC's website.
