WASHINGTON — Doctors typically wait until smokers are ready to quit before prescribing pills to help them do it. But a new study has found that even for those who are not ready to stop smoking immediately, medicine taken over time can substantially improve their chances of eventually quitting.
Clinical practice guidelines have long advised doctors to have their patients set a precise quit date before prescribing medicine such as Chantix, the pills used to treat nicotine addiction that were examined in the study. The idea was that such medicine should not be prescribed for someone who is not serious about quitting. In some cases, insurance plans would not pay for the pills if no quit date had been set.
–
“It’s a paradigm shift because instead of only giving the medication to patients who have set a quit date, you are potentially giving it to every smoker,” said Dr. Jon O. Ebbert, one of the authors, who is a professor of medicine at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine in Minnesota. “It opens the door to a much larger population of smokers that we can treat.”
Most surprising, he said, was the fact that the rates of quitting for smokers in this study who received the treatment and did not want to quit right away were about the same as those in previous studies of patients who wanted to quit abruptly.
