The clinician's role in promoting smoking cessation among clinic patients.
Like other chronic conditions, nicotine dependence offers both challenges and rewards to clinicians. The treatment of this condition frequently requires experience in pharmacology, behavioral science, and social aspects of medicine. Physicians are uniquely qualified to assist patients in their efforts to overcome the multifaceted condition of tobacco addiction. In providing this treatment, the clinical challenges are far outweighed by the benefit to patients who stop smoking. For many patients, smoking cessation is, by far, the most important step they can take to improve their health and increase their life span. Physicians who help patients accomplish this difficult goal provide a life-saving service. There is sufficient scientific evidence to guide physicians in their approach to smoking patients. Brief, systematic interventions have been shown to increase patient smoking cessation rates. The intervention can be described in four steps: ask about smoking, advise smokers to stop, assist those who want to stop, and arrange adequate follow-up. These interventions are used consistently when a smoking cessation program is adopted by an entire office practice. The components of this office-based program include defining staff roles, maintaining a smoke-free office, stocking appropriate materials, making use of the medical record to identify smokers and to remind staff to intervene, and monitoring patient progress. The potential public health impact of physician intervention with smoking patients is enormous. Even with very modest expectations of cessation rates, 100,000 physicians using effective intervention can produce over 3 million new ex-smokers in the United States each year. In conjunction with other community-based tobacco control efforts, this physician-lead effort will result in a marked reduction in the morbidity and mortality caused by smoking and, thus, control of "the most important public health issue of our time."