The state of the art of helping people to stop smoking is doing it in the context of someone else helping, and using medications, using counseling, using all of the tools available to us.
I think it’s really bad advice for people to just to say, ‘I’m going to try to do this on my own’, because we know that counseling helps, that pharmacotherapy helps, we know that combined together is the best way to do it.
It would be like if you come in to see me and you had high cholesterol. Twenty years ago we would have probably sent you away with a diet and exercise.
But in this day and time, diet and exercise is important, but we also use medication like statin drugs to help with that, so we’re well beyond the ‘I’m gonna do this on my own’ sort of phase.
Dr. Richard Hurt
The Mayo Clinic
Physician, researcher, and educator
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