My Background in the Field of Smoking Cessation
So now I was introduced to working with people who were quitting smoking. This is where I really got motivated and excited by the work. For the first time I started to really get to know the people I was lecturing to and I really liked these people. I knew right off that I was helping them in an important area of their lives. The work affected me in a way that I never felt before from my previous lectures.
In my other school based programs and lectures at conferences I would talk to hundreds or sometimes thousands of people at one time, leave, and never see them again. I never knew for sure that what I was saying was really influencing the individuals in the audiences or really making a difference. The clinic work was different. I called the people from my first group daily and they called and kept in touch with me. I kept contact with these people for many years. I maintained contact with one of these original seven people for 28 years until the time of his death in September of 2004. Even after running thousands of people through clinics since 1976, the satisfaction I get from this work still feels the same. It's so hard to describe the feeling of purpose that it has given me. I did this work as a non-paid volunteer from 1971 through 1977, almost full time the last couple of years of that period.
In 1977 I was hired by the American Cancer Society and became the Smoking Program Coordinator for the Chicago Unit. In this capacity I conducted most of the school based smoking programs and the "I Quit Smoking" clinics throughout all of Chicago. I left the American Cancer Society in 1978 when I was hired by the Rush North Shore Medical Center's Good Health Program. The Good Health Program was a pilot program--the first hospital based prevention program in the country. Until this point in time, hospitals were only viewed as a facility where people went when they got sick. The Good Health Program was designed to show that hospitals could do more in trying to prevent people from getting sick.
When I was originally hired the program was only supposed to be a three-year project. I ended up being at the Good Health Program for the next 22 years, providing smoking cessation classes until July of 2000. I loved this work. I got to help a lot of people quit smoking—as many as 10 to 60 people at a time in six-day clinics. I didn't see these people as a group, but rather as10 to 60 individuals that I got to know on a personal and usually a very friendly basis. I liked these smokers, and because I liked them I wanted them to help them become ex-smokers.
As important as the work seemed to me in 1976, it took on a much more important role to me as time went on. After doing clinics for some time another factor made my work in this field seem even more crucial. I began to personally encounter more and more people who were being ravaged by smoking induced diseases. I really began to see the dangers of smoking--not from the view of national statistics, but now from the view of people I knew and cared about. Over the years I have personally known more people who have died from what was most likely smoking induced cancer, heart disease and other conditions than I can count or keep track of. I see my work as a way to prevent others from facing a similar fate. I don't want to be a fanatic in the field, and I have never tried to force my position on others. In the field of smoking cessation I have always just tried to help the people who wanted help to quit.
In 2000 I started sharing my materials on the Internet. I had written almost 100 articles that I used to send to my clinic graduates to help to reinforce concepts they learned in the Stop Smoking Clinic. I donated these letters and gave permission to many different sites to help people looking for information on quitting smoking. Many of the letters were basically sitting in mothballs and the Internet gave them a new life and seems to be a natural outlet for them to continue to help people to quit smoking. Most of the letters are now compiled in a free e-book that can be downloaded at www.whyquit.com/joel/ntap.pdf.
Most of my time now is spent helping people quit through my online work at www.whyquit.com and its Freedom Message board. In all of the programs I have run and to all of the people I reach online I am just trying to get out the life saving message that avoid the danger associated with smoking is as simple as never starting to smoke in the first place, and if you do smoke, the way to minimize future risks is to quit smoking and then to stay free by making and sticking to a personal commitment to never take another puff!