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Money's Better Than E-Cigs Or Nicotine Gum At Helping Smokers Quit, Says Study (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Providing free electronic cigarettes or other stop-smoking products to employees to get them to give up real cigarettes is less effective than the threat of taking away a cash reward for quitting, according to a new study that weighs the effectiveness of a variety of workplace incentive programs. The findings, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, call into question the claims by e-cigarette enthusiasts that the devices may be better than traditional quit aids at helping smokers to stop. The study is also significant because it may be the first to look at programs to get all smoking employees to quit, whether or not they've decided they want to do so. The results show that if the motivation isn't there, neither are the positive results. 9.5 percent of participants who got the free smoking cessation products plus a cash reward ($100 for the first month, an additional $200 at the three-month mark and $300 if they stayed smoke-free for six months) for staying away from tobacco quit.
I smoked a pack a day, and ended up using a vape (a mod box, not a little stick thing which has failed me in the past) to quit.
I save far more than the money they're talking about, and actually quit.
People buy a carton at a time, $100 isn't really much more than just quitting rather than buying a carton.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Why don't the companies just pay non smokers more? Can I start smoking and then quit to reap these rewards? TFA doesn't really go into these questions that I can tell, it just says that it costs $3000 to $6000 more a year to employ smokers.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
I successfully quit after losing my job and being unable to afford cigarettes
The money is probably what will get me to quit. My guess is I spend about $4k on cigs a year. That's like $6k of income before taxes. Started running to try and quit years ago. That didn't work. I ended up not being able to finish an ultra marathon because I ran out of cigarettes. During a marathon I'll spoke about 6 cigarettes, figured a half pack would be enough to do 50km... I was wrong.
Amazing new study shows people will lie for $600
At this point e-cigs are so much better than cigarettes in every way, that you'd have to be a moron to keep using traditional cigarettes at this point. It is true that e-cigs make you look like a tool, but cigarettes make you look like a tool and a fool.
If you smoke cigs, stop today! Switch to e-cigs. You will not regret it.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Here in Germany, e-cigarettes are too low in nicotine to be a real alternative for smokers. A friend of mine tried ordering Juuls from the US (there's no official importer) but the import tax is so prohibitively high that he went back to tar.
I started sucking on $100 bills when I quit. That and the sublingual Bitcoin tokens really seems to be doing the job. I initially tried smoking $2 bills but kept inhaling a super-thin piece of wire. And those holograms. Hoo-boi. Them'll do a nummer on ya.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
Money Fixes Everything! Wha? Changes? Never mind.
I'm really not sure what the point of this study was. If the summary's accurate, all it found out was something we already knew: that the key factor on if you've got any chance of quitting is if you want to quit or not.
Anybody willing to RTFA to find out if they checked if combos of quitting aids and bribe to motivate people to want to quit are more effective than just one tactic on its own? That'd get this out of the 'water is wet' realm of studies...
For whatever reason, there seem tone a lot of people who have decided vaping is really bad, and are trying to kill it, so I see this article as another arm of that effort.
I personally hate smoking. Like really detest it. But vaping while I find a bit annoying, is 1000x times less annoying or horrible than real smoking.
It's also far safer, and gives people nicotine they crave without being nearly as dangerous as "real" smoking.
So don't give in to the people who are trying to kill off vaping, it is helping a LOT of people really improve their health profile.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If that worked, smoking would have long ago stopped existing in many countries due to cigarette taxes. Since that did not happen, I suspect either the study is flawed, or the reasoning must be far more nuanced.
Or maybe we could pay people to provide evidence of wrongdoing?
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
With all the money we get in taxes from smokers, why loose that revenue and even give them some of the money back. It doesn't make any sense for the non-smokers.
Smoking is still better for you than beathing city air. There is a stronger correlation with lung cancer and population density than there is with smoking. The studies showing smoking causes cancer in rats, subjected those rats to nearly LD50 levels of smoke that probably would have killed them just as quickly from carbon monoxide poisoning. Smoking doesn't cause cancer, however it will trigger it if you're genetically prone to it. But there are many centenarians who are daily smokers. My own mother smoked a pack a day from the age of 13, she died at 97 last year and it wasn't from lung related anything.
I've been smoking since the age of 12, and I'm probably at a pack a day since the Navy about 20 years ago. I'm just shy of 50, I have no diminished lung capacity, I have no heart problems , I have no emphysema, no bronchitis, no lung cancer and or other "issues". At my last physical 4 weeks ago, the Dr said I have the lungs of an 18 year old swimmer.
I realize that anecdotes are not evidence. But here's truth, if your immune system is strong you simply don't get these kinds of things. However living in big cities where you walk outside and the air is thick with car exhaust and as polluted as the backroom of a speakeasy, then spend half the day, indoors breathing the recirculated, filtered, whatever air is just asking for trouble.
Move out to the boondocks where the only air pollution is the methane from the cow farm 2 miles away. You'll live longer, you'll be healthier and you can smoke whatever makes you happy with no one to bother you.
If your employer is trying to get you to quit smoking, realize they're going to ask you to quit soda pop in another few years, probably push you into some fad diet BS. It's all about controlling healthcare costs. Control your own healthcare, move somewhere healthier in general.
Presumably, the employer's share of healthcare expenses for smoking employees is higher than the cost of this program, which appears to be $600 plus the cost of cessation products
This assumes that the company provides healthcare.
It also doesn't counter those who pretend to smoke then pretend to give up when they didn't smoke in the first place. The people who are worse off are genuine non-smokers.
Read the books "Addiction is a choice" (which this study clearly proves) and "The myth of addiction".
There is no such thing as 'addiction', it is simply a choice that people make, usually in order to avoid feeling certain feelings that they find unpleasant.
Or the psychological effect of being given something extra if they are incapable of internalizing the long term savings alone.
That's what I'm thinking too.
And even if they are capable of intellectually understanding the long term saving along, monetary reward would still be a way to also stimulate on the instinctive way.
When you look at it(*), cigarettes work by hacking the brain's reward system (tweaking the dopamine levels. A little bit like cocaine, only not so violently).
The smoker who have addiction/craving are basically looking for a quick push on their "reward" button.
(And that's how you end up developing the addiction. The brain learn a quick way to get a reward).
Giving money will probably be perceived as reward, you're giving an alternative reward to your brain. :-P )
(The same way some people manage to quit smoking by displacing their craving to another quick reward, like over-eating).
After six months, most of the addiction effects are gone. You don't "crave" to get a "quick reward" monetary response at 12months, and thus don't need one, so the 1/3/6 months scheme is good enough. Plus :
- By then you'd be saving actual money be removing packs/cartons from your monthly budget. So you'd definitely not be need more money from a budget perspective either. (In addition to the "reward" perspective above).
- Quitting smoking saves money to society by removing health risks that would otherwise lead to costly chronic disease. It's 600$ given away to stop smoking, but it's much money saved from health. Thus it makes sense for the healthcare to invest money in such a quiting scheme. (Well, at least for countries where we actually do have some healthcare system. Too bad for you, US !
---
(*) I'm intentionnally over-simplifying for the demonstration purpose.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Nicotine has a direct action on the amount of energy you brun vs store.
Even if you keep the exact same physical activity levels and diet, once you quit smoking, you'll suddenly start putting on weight.
So it's not necessarily true that the parent poster was eating more and/or exercising less and needs to be reminded.
Also, for some people, quitting smoking works by shifting their craving for quick reward to another target. For the parent poster that was shifting to vaping and the progressively shifting to vaping non-nicotine liquids. But for other people it might by food that's the "replacement quick reward" which does lead to over-eating and could be difficult to manage.
Lastly "eat less" is easy to say, but you'll feel empty-stomached if you only simply eat half the quantity of your usual diet (that's a very bad strategy).
A nutritionist would typically help you find ways to have you plate as full as before or even bigger while at the same time being healthier for you, all the while being tasty.
(Hint: it doesn't boil down to simply "well, eat green leafs of salad". You'd need diversity)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I smoked two packs a day for ten years. I quit cold turkey, because I wanted to. I would not describe it as easy, but it wasn't as difficult as I feared. The cravings subsided after a week or so. I probably chewed up a forest worth of toothpicks over the following months. Eventually, I quit counting the days and came to regard myself as a non-smoker. Secondhand smoke (and vaping) annoys me now, just like most people.
I do not consider myself a paragon of willpower. (My life is evidence of this) I suspect most smokers who have difficulty quitting don't really want to quit, they just feel like they should.
Like many things in life, it is a question of how badly you want it.
I smoke about for packs a year. I'd consider quitting the habit if somebody offered $20k per year not to smoke. Maybe I'd take $15k or even $10k provided I could still smoke cigars on holidays.
$600 to give up smoking for six months is at least an order of magnitude too low.
It's well known that we're not rational economic creatures... There are many examples of this, for example loss aversion..
I would be that fear of missing out on the bonus hits you far harder than the much higher cost of smoking.
I wouldn't be surprised if _fear of missing out_ on the bonus is more effective than the huge taxes that a factored into tobacco prices in many countries.
Although not a universally true, it is a very common occurrence that people will stop smoking when properly motivated to do so: the promise of payments for doing so fits the bill, and so does (for the most part) a hefty heart attack at an early age. While the physiological (and psychological) addiction is a fact, most smokers do not stop smoking simply because they do not want to do so.
Trying to social engineer society. How about you just hire the best person for a job and ensure they get it done and leave their personal habits out of the workplace?
I can't wait for the next wave of these... bonus for losing weight, going vegan, voting democrat. Or at another company... bonus for being an ethical hunter, drinking American beer and voting Republican.
I can't wait!
Captcha: Caffeine - Yeah, let's see a company go after THAT one!
That makes perfect sense. Give the dog a bone and he won't bite you ever.
Leave it to the e-cig modders to come up with a sub-ohm version of this.
Have gnu, will travel.
Yeah about that. If you smoke a pack a day you are spending ~1,820$ over 6 months. Unless I'm bad at math 1,820$ > 600$,l so the incentive to save $$$ should have fixed the problem long ago it cash works.
How do you create a BS piece like this?
Easy. Make sure people are given those crappy little e-Cigs instead of a proper vape. With a proper vape the instant quit rate is huge. I have wiped out smoking from the people I know, with 2 exceptions this way. It is so reliable that I'm fine buying people vapes. My story is not in any way out of the ordinary.
Want the opposite results from this piece? Get you test subjects a real vape and let them vape at their desk rather than having to go out with the smokers.
You should have been suspicious when vapes were not one of the smoking cessation products. The difference between a vape and a nicitrol inhaler? With a vape you get a cloud. With the Nicitrol inhaler you get a product made by Pfizer. The cloud is a huge part of the success, maybe all smokers secretly want to be dragons.
Big Tobacco and Big pharma do not like vapes for a very good reason. They are also a huge power when it comes to funding studies and buying ads to get those studies in the news.
So you get garbage like this, like the study where they told the researcher to scorch the fluid so it would produce carcinogens, the study where.. yeah. lots of FUD out there.
Or maybe we could pay people to provide evidence of wrongdoing?
We, or more specifically the DNC, has already paid Fusion GPS to have that evidence fabricated. Where have you been?
I found it very very difficult to quit, and tried to quit several times. I found the Allen Carr method helped with the psychological side, patches with the physical side, and not drinking/not going to places where I was likely to be tempted to smoke for the not resuming smoking side. It took several *years* before the craving for a cigarette went away. Now I just regret smoking/not giving up sooner. I gave up before vaping took off, but I think having a healthier alternative to smoking tobacco is a good idea.
Or maybe we could pay people to provide evidence of wrongdoing?
Why bother when Rudy Giuliani provides it for free?
So you get a lot of money for giving up an unhealthy habbit which you shouldn't have taken up in the first place.. So what do non-smokers get as a reward for not smoking in the first place? So the smoker get's $600 after half a year after he/she quits, but the nonsmoker doesn't get anything? that sounds very unfair.