Frank Leone, MD, helps patients control the instinctive compulsion to smoke.
The beginning of a new year is often a time to stop smoking – a fresh start. But, by the end of February, many give up, being continuously drawn back to nicotine.
According to Frank Leone, MD, director of Penn Stop: Penn’s Comprehensive Smoking Treatment Program, “The minute a smoker says, ‘I want to quit smoking,’ an internal voice is saying ‘but maybe not now.’ It’s a conflict they can find difficult to solve.”
Penn Stop focuses on first controlling this instinctive compulsion to smoke, which can lead to behavioral changes. To help people overcome their ambivalence, Leone and his team use a simple strategy: validate, reframe, and repeat.
“You need to identify and validate patient concerns,” Leone said. For example, if a person lights up to handle stress, “we help them find new ways to see their stress and manage it without tobacco,” he said. “By combining those strategies with available resources, we can help them feel comfortable taking that first step.”
Leone wants tobacco use treatment to become part of a patient’s overall care plan, like other consults. He reaches out to specialists with “ways to integrate simple action steps about tobacco dependence into the day-to-day workflow of various specialties,” he said. In addition, he collaborated on a study with Robert Schnoll, PhD, director of director of Penn’s Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Nicotine Addiction, to use electronic medical records to identify cancer patients who smoke and then refer them to tobacco cessation treatment. Leone’s ultimate goal is to “establish a more organized, formalized workflow pattern” to get patients with nicotine dependence the help they need.
Learn more about Penn’s ‘Stop Smoking” program. You can also follow Penn Stop on Twitter – @PennMedTobacco.