 |
|
|
|
 How You Can Help
As a first step, if you care for or about someone with asthma who smokes, encourage them to quit smoking. If you are a smoker who lives with someone with asthma, think twice before lighting up. Secondhand smoke can be a potent asthma trigger. Practicing good smoking hygiene around people with asthma may help diminish their exacerbations, and helps them in their efforts to quit if they smoke too. Research shows that people can quit smoking, and they are more likely to be successful if they get help. Advice from a health care provider, behavioral counseling either through classes or the telephone, web-based support groups, nicotine replacement therapy and buproprion all increase success. Unfortunately Oregon's Tobacco Quit Line, which helps people quit and connects them to further services, is suspended (at least until July 1) due to the state budget crisis. In the meantime, information about help is available on the web at www.OregonQuitLine.org.
If you are a health care provider, try to think of tobacco dependence as a chronic condition.As with other chronic diseases like diabetes, hypertension, and asthma, clinicians treating a tobacco-dependent patient must provide simple counseling advice, support, and appropriate pharmacotherapy where appropriate. Research indicates the best way to help patients quit smoking is consistency in the message delivered by health care providers. Moreover, clinicians need to recognize that relapse is common and that it is a sign of the chronic nature of dependence. Given the difficulties that so many tobacco users have in stopping smoking, it is important that clinicians be prepared to intervene.The five major steps to intervention in the primary care setting are:
- (1) ask the patient if he or she uses tobacco;
- (2) advise him or her to quit;
- (3) assess willingness to make a quit attempt;
- (4) assist those who are willing to make a quit attempt; and
- (5) arrange for follow-up contact to prevent relapse.
These strategies are designed to require three minutes or less of direct clinician time.
Health care systems that incorporate tobacco use assessment and intervention as part of routine medical care will foster the adoption of these strategies. These strategies are consistent with the recommendations of the American Medical Women?s Association,American Academy of Pediatrics, the National Cancer Institute, and the American Medical Association. A physician's advice to quit was an important motivator mentioned by smokers attempting to stop smoking. Health care providers interact with a considerable number of people with asthma who may also smoke every day. Thus it is imperative that every encounter is used to assess the need for tobacco cessation, and offer the necessary guidance and support to achieve it.
|
|
|
