My father-in-law is in his 70s and still smokes every day. He’s tried to quit before, but in the recent years has decided that he was old enough to live his life however he wanted, and that included smoking. Nevermind the fact that he has had a quadruple bypass operation for his clogged arteries (and other coronary operations), is on polypharmacy, leads a sedentary lifestyle, and has been nagged by his doctors and us about quitting smoking for years.
I know that many doctors – especially internists and general practitioners/family doctors – often encourage their smoking patients to quit smoking, citing the harms of smoking and the benefits of not smoking relative to the patient’s capacity to heal. Even those of us who do not practice medicine but work in the healthcare field know that smoking wreaks havoc on a variety of bodily functions right down to the molecular level.
Earlier this year, three Greek researchers published a study on why smokers quit or don’t quit smoking in Harm Reduction Journal (source: Harm Reduction Journal, March 29, 2006, 3:13 doi:10.1186/1477-7517-3-13). What they found may give some insight not just to medical doctors with an interest to helping their patients quit smoking, but for those of us with a personal interest to help either our loved ones or ourselves to quit smoking.
A popular assumption many doctors have about smokers quitting smoking is to introduce cognitive dissonance – an emotional state of mind where two beliefs are in conflict with each other. A person experiencing cognitive dissonance will move to resolve that conflict of belief. If a smoker believes that smoking is harmful to one’s health yet continues to smoke, the smoker experiences this contradiction and would move to resolve that contradiction. One would assume that the smoker would then stop smoking – right?
I doubt that smokers would deny the harmful effects of smoking. We can see from what’s happening in society that this is not the case – people still smoke even when they’ve been exposed to anti-smoking campaigns, nagging from friends and loved ones (I admit, I am one of those annoying people who remind their friends that smoking is bad for them), and shock-and-awe pictures of lungs blackened by chronic smoking.
