Refined Solution A Solution Refinement for Individual Smoking Cessation

Original Issue:

Cigarette-smoking, tobacco addiction and nicotine dependency are widespread and permeating public health concerns. Indeed, the combination of the high rate of addiction to tobacco products and the clear empirical relationship between these products and a number of critical negative and even fatal health outcomes qualifies this is a substantial problem requiring a direct solution. According to the National Cancer Institute (NCI), "smoking is a leading cause of cancer and death from cancer. It causes cancers of the lung, esophagus, larynx, mouth, throat, kidney, bladder, pancreas, stomach, and cervix, as well as acute myeloid leukemia. Smoking also causes heart disease, stroke, aortic aneurysm (a balloon-like bulge in an artery in the chest), chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) (chronic bronchitis and emphysema), asthma, hip fractures, and cataracts." (NCI, p.1)

This constitutes a very compelling motive for pursuing resolution of the problem in question through the subject's total cessation of smoking. For the scale of the present Solution-Refinement, the goal of smoking cessation will be applied to a test sample of one. In this case, a close personal acquaintance who has struggled with cigarette addiction for many years is the subject of an intervention effort. Thus, the original issue is this individual's...

According to the subject, his first attempts at cessation involved the method known as 'cold turkey.' Here, the individual ceased all smoking at a determined point with the intention of withholding from smoking from that point forward. The subject reports that with varying degrees of short-term success, this method had been attempted multiple times. At no point did this approach result in a permanent cessation of the smoking addiction. Moreover, this attempted initial solution would place the subject in the largest category of current tobacco users. According to the CDC Online Newsroom (2011), "The report says 68.8% of current American adult smokers say they want to quit and 52.4% of adult smokers tried to quit within the past year. The report says 48.3% of smokers who saw a health professional in the past year recalled getting advice to quit." (CDC Online News Room, p. 1)
This places the personal acquaintance at the center of this Solution Refinement in common demographic of smokers who have demonstrated clear interest in quitting but who have been unable to do so without the proper support. In addition to the cold turkey method, the subject would attempt to use such over-the-counter methods of cessation as nicotine gum and the nicotine patch. However, these independent methods of withdrawing from usage would provide difficult and fruitless.

Critical Examination of Best Solution:

Thus, we must consider for the subject in question an approach that diverges from these independent approaches and that relies on certain measures of outside support. As the critical examination here indicates, smokers who engage some of these support channels tend to…