Question

Scenario 4: Your efforts to convince your friends to avoid smoking (or stop smoking) focus on giving them the facts about how cigarettes cause lung cancer, throat cancer, and serious heart disease. You are frustrated by how little impact you have on your friends. What tools are available to better explain and predict health behavior?

Answer 1

• The important thing to understand is that people who smoke choose to do so despite its ill-effects. Do not make the mistake of believing even for a bit of a second that they are oblivious to the dangers of smoking.
• Cancer, lung diseases, heart attacks, deaths — they know it all too well. The horror story isn’t so terrifying for them because addiction renders the smokers tone-deaf to logic and reasoning.
• The best way is to point them to therapy, send them in direction of professional help even then they must be willing to follow through.Continue to voice your worry time and again.
• Health behaviour models and theories can help explain and predict health behaviour,providing useful road maps for the development of health promotion strategies.
• Social marketing and development and implementation of strategies for promoting health behaviour which are aimed at preserving,promoting, and protecting health of the people.
• Helping people around you who indulge in smoking or any other unhealthy behaviour by creating new habits leading to a behavioural change like developing a schedule for them related to when they need to exercise or take their medicine or go for an extra-curricular activity.
• Patients are likely to accept advice on changing their smoking habits from an acknowledged expert on health problems (Slama, et al., 1989). In addition, individuals tend to feel physically vulnerable when with a physician, and more willing to accept health risk counselling.
• Offer literature and film/videos on the risks of smoking, if materials are available to you.