When you quit, "Does every essay count?

The FDA's latest anti-smoking campaign, titled "Every Try Counts," tells smokers not to lament the failures of attempts to quit. Instead, smokers are told that even attempts that end quickly with the resumption of smoking – as happens for about 90% of quit attempts – should be considered positively, as a practice or part of a quit. process. The campaign consists mainly of point-of-sale advertisements and a website with associated online tools.

There is little new in this campaign, with its messages and "motivational" tools that only serve to focus events. The novel tells smokers that it is right to try and not quit. It may be useful, as the FDA claims (although there is no apparent research or analysis to support this claim). It may be that it enhances the well-being of smokers, which reduces the usual effect of insulting the injury by being embarrassed to fail. This alone is worth something.

This could even motivate other attempts to abandon, some of which will succeed. Some smokers might think, "Okay, I'll try to stop today, even if I'm waiting to fail, because this failure is still a success." This message is consistent with established cognitive-behavioral therapy techniques, in which to go out and fail (for example, be rejected by a potential new friend or date, or write a terrible chapter project of their novel). This can break the paralyzing hesitation to try even because of the fear of failure. However, this is typically an explicit exercise to try to collect failures, and the FDA message does not really go far enough to accomplish this.

As typical for tobacco control, there is no evidence that this message will have any benefits. The program will never be seriously evaluated. The anti-smoking efforts are based on the vague feeling that the intervention could have a positive effect, with a thick layer of rhetoric, and not a real science.

Moreover, there is a serious disadvantage to this message. For the FDA, this is probably considered a feature, not a bug, which could explain why they are deploying this message now. Thanks to vaping, it has become increasingly clear to smokers that switching to a low risk alternative (if this product pleases them) is far less likely to fail than other methods of doing so. ; abandonment. This was true also for smokeless tobacco before vaping, but fewer smokers knew that it was a good option.

But the FDA (and their partner in the National Cancer Institute) takes the extremist anti-smoking stance, about) eliminating the risk to health by changing is far worse than becoming abstinent from all products. The extremist position is that the total number of product users, rather than the health risks or other real concerns, is what matters most. That's why they declare "all users of tobacco products" – an insignificant statistic for any practical purpose – and deplore any increase, even when smoking is down and that c & rsquo; It's only (almost harmless) that vaping is on the rise.

a smoker tries to stop by abstinence, and probably fails, only for her to go to the vaping. The message that smokers should rejoice at their failed attempts to quit seems to be designed to discourage switching success.

This message is deadly. As I explained in an article entitled "Demystifying the statement that abstinence is generally healthier for smokers than switching to a low-risk alternative," this analysis shows that only a few Extra smoking weeks are more harmful than a lifetime of low risk product use. Even if we assume that the alternative products are somewhat harmful, the change is even less risky than the failed failures that the FDA is now encouraging.

If we assume that a low-risk alternative like vaping poses 1% risk of smoking (which is a pessimistic assumption), then only a few months of extra smoking poses more health risks than any other a life of using the alternative. A more realistic (ie, lower) estimate of the risk associated with vaping or smokeless smoking reduces this risk to weeks or days. (And, of course, zero risk reduces it to zero times.) Failed abandonment attempts make people smoke for months or years longer, which increases their risk to health.

In other words, stop smoking early more. The likelihood that a successful smoking cessation method is far more important than the method. From the health point of view, an unsuccessful abandonment attempt is more damaging than using an alternative product like vaping, even assuming that these products are substantially harmful. Only a person who is concerned about the number of heads, rather than the number of people, would recommend a failed attempt to refrain from a more promising attempt to change