Physician advice for smoking cessation

Advice from doctors helps people who smoke to quit. Even when doctors provide brief simple advice about quitting smoking this increases the likelihood that someone who smokes will successfully quit and remain a nonsmoker 12 months later. More intensive advice may result in slightly higher rates of quitting. Providing follow‐up support after offering the advice may increase the quit rates slightly.

Implications for practice

The results of this review indicate the potential benefit from brief simple advice given by physicians to their smoking patients. The challenge as to whether or not this benefit will be realised depends on the extent to which physicians are prepared to systematically identify their smoking patients and offer them advice as a matter of routine.
Providing follow‐up, if possible, is likely to produce additional benefit. However, the marginal benefits of more intensive interventions, including use of aids, are small, and cannot be justified as a routine intervention in unselected smokers. They may, however, be of benefit for individual, motivated smokers.