Thursday, May 10, 2007

German Crusade to Stop Smoking

Did you know how cigarettes trigger you to smoke? Here's a related explanation by Ivan Pavlov, a physiologist who studied changes in behavior in the early 1900s. One of his observations was that dogs normally salivate just as they are given food. In one of his experiments, he rang a bell just before he fed his dogs. Subsequently, the dogs began to associate and link the sound of the bell with food. Soon, they salivated even if he rang the bell without giving them any food. The dogs had learned “The bell rings means I’m going to be fed!” Pavlov describes this phenomenon as "a conditioned response".

The same "conditioned response" or association, the term we prefer to use, occurs with you and smoking. After smoking many, many cigarettes, your daily routine and acts become associated with smoking and triggers the urge to smoke. For example, if you smoke every time you drive, just getting into the car can activate associations to smoke, as if your brain tells you, “I’m in the car now so its time to smoke!”

Similarly, if you smoke immediately after you wake up each morning, you mind associates smoking with waking up from sleep. Even long after you’ve quit smoking, you may still get triggers to smoke when you wake up. Understanding and dealing with these powerful associations is one of the most important parts of quitting smoking.

There are striking parallels between the Nazi 'war on cancer' and the New Labour crusade against smoking (1). In Nazi Germany, every individual had 'a duty to be healthy'; furthermore, to ensure that individuals fulfilled this duty, the government insisted on 'the primacy of the public good over individual liberties'. Tony Blair acknowledges that smokers - and non-smokers - have rights. More importantly, however, 'both have responsibilities - to themselves, to each other, to their families, and to the wider community'.

To ensure that smokers meet these responsibilities, the government is planning further bans and proscriptions on their activities. In Germany in the 1930s, the medical profession played a leading role in the state campaign to restrict smoking. In Britain today, doctors again provide medical legitimacy and moral authority for state regulation of individual behavior.

There are of course also striking differences between the Nazi and New Labour anti-smoking campaigns. The anti-Semitic and eugenic themes of the 1930s are absent today; many of Germany's leading anti-tobacco activists were also war criminals.

Another difference is in the consequences of an authoritarian public health policy for science. Whereas in Nazi Germany pioneering scientific research took place into the health effects of tobacco, we find today in Britain that epidemiology has been degraded in the service of political expediency.

There has been a marked reluctance among British medical authorities to acknowledge German achievements in research into the health effects of smoking. Yet according to Robert Proctor's authoritative account, The Nazi War on Cancer, up to the Second World War, 'German tobacco epidemiology was the most advanced in the world'. In 1929 Franz Lickint, a physician from Chemnitz, published the first statistical evidence - a 'case series' study - suggesting a link between cigarettes and lung cancer. He went on to become a leading campaigner against smoking in the Nazi era.

Campaigns like these have been launched by the Germans to stop smoking. These are the efforts done way back in the Nazi era just to let the people know the risks of getting lung cancer. However, to the present day, there are still numerous campaigns out there to stop smoking. The best way for them to work is by getting yourself involved as they can give you almost all of the help you need to quit.

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