The physician's role in smoking cessation.

Physicians have many opportunities to facilitate smoking cessation among individual patients, and this could be complemented by efforts to curb smoking at the community level. If every physician advised all smokers to quit, there would be considerable public health benefit from the additional 5% to 10% of smokers who followed the advice. The benefits would be substantially greater if the interventions were targeted to the smoker's stage of change and with ongoing participation by the physician in the smoking cessation process. Possibly as important as the physician's active role with individual smokers are community-wide efforts to curb tobacco smoking. These efforts are essential to the prevention of the initiation of cigarette smoking among children and adolescents. Changing societal norms regarding cigarette smoking will not only decrease the numbers of future smokers but will also assist current smokers in cessation efforts.