www.alcohol-drugs.co.uk – the blog

ABSTRACT It has been argued that the preponderance of studies into individual smoking cessation therapies seems grossly out of proportion to the number of people who use these therapies to quit smoking, and that this imbalance is due to factors such as the role of the pharmaceutical industry in funding research and a general bias towards individual- rather than population-based approaches to medical and health problems. We believe that there are other significant factors that affect the balance of research in smoking cessation, such as the higher standards of evidence required to justify the implementation of individual medical therapies compared with population-based interventions. We argue that research practitioners in the area of population tobacco control are well placed to address this imbalance by setting more rigorous standards of evidence for population health interventions.