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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."
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.
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
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
Presumably, the employer's share of healthcare expenses for smoking employees is higher than the cost of this program, which appears to be $600 plus the cost of cessation products
This assumes that the company provides healthcare.
It also doesn't counter those who pretend to smoke then pretend to give up when they didn't smoke in the first place. The people who are worse off are genuine non-smokers.
Or the psychological effect of being given something extra if they are incapable of internalizing the long term savings alone.
That's what I'm thinking too.
And even if they are capable of intellectually understanding the long term saving along, monetary reward would still be a way to also stimulate on the instinctive way.
When you look at it(*), cigarettes work by hacking the brain's reward system (tweaking the dopamine levels. A little bit like cocaine, only not so violently).
The smoker who have addiction/craving are basically looking for a quick push on their "reward" button.
(And that's how you end up developing the addiction. The brain learn a quick way to get a reward).
Giving money will probably be perceived as reward, you're giving an alternative reward to your brain. :-P )
(The same way some people manage to quit smoking by displacing their craving to another quick reward, like over-eating).
After six months, most of the addiction effects are gone. You don't "crave" to get a "quick reward" monetary response at 12months, and thus don't need one, so the 1/3/6 months scheme is good enough. Plus :
- By then you'd be saving actual money be removing packs/cartons from your monthly budget. So you'd definitely not be need more money from a budget perspective either. (In addition to the "reward" perspective above).
- Quitting smoking saves money to society by removing health risks that would otherwise lead to costly chronic disease. It's 600$ 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 !
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(*) 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 ]
That is a lie. Smoking is far worse than breathing city air.
Or one could read things based on science using real studies stretching back hundreds of years. While the "Addiction is a choice" book may* have a point in weakening some myths it seem* to reinforce others. It also seem* to be describing things in a dishonest way - while addiction in itself may not be a disease it is associated with such. A massive panic attack combined with the physical symptoms of withdrawal _is_ a mental problem, one that can be very damaging.
But of course almost everything is a choice. One can choose to not eat anything, I'd suggest the author try that for a while until his smile fade and he understands why the core idea of the book is pretty damn stupid.
(* read reviews and excerpts)
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.
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.
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.