From DAVID ROBERTS
I was surprised to read the suggestion that willpower is a relatively
unsuccessful method of giving up smoking (This Week, 31 October).
My own experience, and that of all of the reformed smokers I know, is
that will power is the key ingredient. Without the commitment to quit, none
of the other methods worked at all.
The conflict between my experience and the meta-analysis quoted in the
article leads me to ask how the study samples were chosen.
Studies which sample people on treatment programmes will always underestimate
the efficacy of willpower, since individuals who simply quit smoking, using
their unaided willpower, do not participate in treatment programmes.
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Inviting people to participate in a trial is equally futile. Unless
someone has already made the commitment to quit, simply asking them to try
will not generate that commitment and the success rate will be low. More
fundamentally, we can’t anticipate the strength of an individual’s willpower
or commitment. We can’t establish that a person really meant to give up
until they have actually done so.
The best we can do is look at the general population; find those people
who have given up; and ask them how they did it. I suspect that if this
had been the only methodology used in the studies, willpower would have
a much higher success rate than quoted in the meta-analysis.
David Roberts Curtin, ACT Australia
