India, which has the smoking population of around 2 crores, has finally come up with something really constructive to combat this fatal addiction. The health ministry of India is planning to open 100 tobacco cessation clinics across the country within the next two years.
The basic idea is to help chain smokers on behavioural changes and also introduce them to meditation techniques which will help them quit smoking besides putting them on Nicotine Replacement Therapy. All these clinics will have a clinical psychologist and a counselor.
Another positive step taken by the health ministry is to make it mandatory for the country’s 275 medical colleges both public and private and 600 district headquarter hospitals to start similar cessation clinics.
Earlier the WHO and the health ministry made a combined effort and ran 18 cessation clinics in 17 states. The first such clinic came up in Delhi in 2002. Since then, 40,000 smokers have visited these 18 clinics with a quit rate of 15%-20%.
Let’s hope that this new step will decrease the smoker’s ratio in a phenomenal manner. The anti-smoking awareness that the entire world is witnessing is quite noteworthy. Many smokers in European countries have left smoking by taking anti-smoking pills like Chantix. Let’s join in this effort to make the world a cigarette free zone.
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