Patients to hear more from docs on smoking
The state Health Department is spending $1.2 million to run anti-smoking ads in medical journals, major daily newspapers and other publications in New York, and on Web sites, that urge health-care providers to talk to patients who are smokers. The campaign’s Web site is www.TalkToYourPatients.org.
“Studies show that many clinicians think they will alienate smokers by addressing the issue, but we have found that smokers expect doctors to ask them about smoking and are actually more satisfied with their care when offered assistance to quit,” Dr. Richard Daines, state health commissioner, said in a statement.
The campaign is the second phase of the Health Department’s “Don’t Be Silent About Smoking” campaign launched last year, which reached nearly four in 10 physicians in New York.
New York has 2.6 million smokers, 60 percent of whom tried to quit in 2007. The majority who try to quit without effective treatment relapse to smoking, according to the Health Department. About 25,500 New Yorkers die every year from smoking. Two-thirds of smokers have visited a health-care provider in the past year.
For more information, visit www.nyhealth.gov or call the Smokers’ Quitline at 866-697-8487.
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Call me crazy but, how much money have we spent on telling people not to smoke???
Doctors have no problem with telling people not to drink, not to do drugs-when was smoking left out of that chain?
We are going to spend $1.2 million dollars more telling people not to smoke??XX?? Like they haven’t heard it. Tell you what, the money would be far better spent putting food into the food pantries, or to the Red Cross, or to medical treatment for those who are addicted and seeking help-not to the bearers of bad news who are supposed to be delivering the news without extra pay. IMHO
Smoking Room Respite
On holidays especially
We see their remains
Droppings of discarded butts
Crushed used-up thrown away
Sometimes lit with a match
Exiled outdoors from gatherings
As if they were lepers caught in coughing spasms
Ashy fumes stamped on them
Like noxious supermarket barcodes
Sometimes flamed by plastic lighters
While we remain inside free of nicotine
Safely removed from a combustive sickness
While we watch the telltale puff-puff-puff-puff
Wondering about this fascination to self-immolate
Sometimes ignited with other lit stubs
Forced by us to stand and wait apart
From forlorn funereal groupings ahead of their own
Silhouettes of growing shadows
Briefly glowing then gone.