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Joel Spitzer has been a leading authority in the development and implementation of smoking cessation and prevention programs for over 30 years. Far from just following and teaching the commonly held beliefs of the day, he recognized early on that nicotine was an addiction while most of the medical and scientific community contended it was simply a habit. His early insights allowed him to develop and implement nicotine prevention and intervention strategies that were decades ahead of their time. Participants in his clinics have success in quitting at rates that far exceed the national average for such programs.
Since 2000 he has served as Director of Education at www.WhyQuit.com, a volunteer position for which he has never accepted any form of compensation, fee or donation whatsoever, either direct or indirect. Visit WhyQuit's Financial Disclosure page for more detailed information. His online materials are widely and freely utilized by many Internet based quitting sites.
He also serves as a smoking prevention and cessation consultant to the Department of Health and Human Services of Evanston, Illinois. Mr. Spitzer has been providing smoking cessation and prevention services since 1972, first as a volunteer speaker, then as member of the professional staff of the American Cancer Society, and later as the smoking programs coordinator for the Rush North Shore Medical Center's Good Health Program.
He has conducted more than 350 six-session stop smoking clinics to over 4,500 participants, including programs for major corporations, medium and small sized companies, universities, health departments and numerous hospitals in the Metropolitan Chicago area.
In addition to nicotine cessation clinics, he has developed and presented smoking education seminars to both adult and school age groups. Since 1972, he has presented over 690 single-session seminars to approximately 100,000 people. He has been a primary speaker on the physical, psychological, and social aspects of smoking at over 30 major conferences on smoking and health throughout Illinois. He has trained physician and lay speakers for the American Cancer Society.
He has conducted numerous radio, television, newspaper and magazine interviews. He has written over 100 articles used as part of the follow-up reinforcement for participants of his Stop Smoking Clinics. Most of these articles have been compiled into a free e-book that can be downloaded in an Adobe Postscript Format by clicking on http://www.whyquit.com/joel/ntap.pdf. Since August of 2005 over one million copies of this book have been downloaded off the Internet. He has recently began producing self-help videos available on the Internet at http://www.whyquit.com/joel/#video. Since the beginning of October 2006 approximately 400,000 of these videos have been watched from the www.whyquit.com site.
