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Stopping smoking online
Jean-Francois Etter
Abstract
Face-to-face counseling for smoking cessation is effective but costly, few smokers may want to attend smoking cessation clinics, and trained counselors are not available everywhere. On the other hand, booklets on quitting smoking are cheap and easy to distribute broadly, but they may not be very effective. The internet has the potential to provide access to counseling programs designed by highly qualified professionals to millions of smokers, many of whom would not otherwise have obtained any counseling at all. Psychological theory and the Internet can be combined to disseminate individually-tailored counseling at population level.
Comprehensive, interactive smoking cessation websites may be expensive to develop, but they can reach millions of smokers at a low cost per visitor. Internet services are available ubiquitously and at all times, and in developed countries, most adults now have access to the internet. Research showed that the internet is an appropriate media to disseminate smoking cessation information and counseling among the less educated. Adolescents may however not be very interested in using the internet to quit smoking. There are however very few published trials of the efficacy of smoking cessation websites, many websites do not use interactive features, quality is often low and commercialisation of the field may present some risks. Perspectives include a closer collaboration between websites and other interventions (telephone quitlines, clinics), the development of interactive programs to improve use of and compliance with external treatments (either behavioural of pharmacological), and the use of more sophisticated, interactive computer-tailored interventions.
Biography
JF Etter obtained a PhD in political science and a master degree of public health from the University of Geneva, Switzerland. He is a senior lecturer at this University, and is the author of over 70 peer-reviewed publications, most of them of tobacco dependence. He conducted several research projects on the use of the internet as a smoking cessation tool.
Jean-Francois Etter
Senior lecturer
IMSP- CMU - 1, rue Michel-Servet
University of Geneva
Geneva 4
CH-1211
Switzerland
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