Unit 5  Section 3 Exercise 7Quitters
Clinical correlate #5 Smoking cessation
Read the following vignettes and answer the discussion questions.
1. One of us has a sporting teammate who immortalized the value of advice-giving. He went to the doctor with a sports injury and came hobbling back to the next game, free of cigarettes for the first time in his adult life. “yes,” he said, “I went to the doc, and he gave me a hard time. He lifted his finger and said, “watch it, stop smoking, OK?” So I’ve done it, and that’s it, end of story.’ Some 3 years later this man remained free of nicotine dependence.
From Rollnick, Mason and Butler Health Behavior Change p. 25 Elesvier 1999
2. From “Letting go.” David Sedaris, The New Yorker, May 5, 2008.
My last cigarette was smoked in a bar at Charles de Gaulle airport. It was January 2, 2007…
“All right, I said, “this is it, my final one.” Six minutes later, I pulled out my pack and said the same thing. Then I did it one more time. “This is it. I mean it.” All around me, people were enjoying cigarettes: the ruddy Irish couple, the Spaniards with their glasses of beer. There were the Russians, the Italians, even some Chinese…These were my people, and now I would be betraying them….When I eventually got up to leave, Hugh pointed out that I had five cigarettes left in my pack. “Are you just going to leave them there on the table?” I answered with a line I got years ago from a German woman….”Karl has…finished with his smoking.”
She meant of course that he had quit, but I much preferred her mistaken version. “Finished” made it sound as if he’d been allotted a certain number of cigarettes, three hundred thousand, say, delivered at the time of his birth…. This, I thought, was how I would look at it. Yes, there were five more Kool Milds in that particular pack, and twenty-six cartons stashed away at home, but those were extra—an accounting error. In terms of my smoking, I had just finished with it.
Study Questions
- How many attempts do smokers generally have to make before they successfully quit smoking?
- The 2 excerpts above give examples of patients who appear able to quit definitively on the basis of a sheet act of will. What accounts for these successful behaviors? Are there some people who are just able to quit cold turkey? [answer]
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