Why Does the Research Concentrate on Assisted Cessation?
With approximately two-thirds [16] to three-quarters [15] of ex-smokers stopping unaided, our finding that 91.3% of recent intervention studies focused on assisted cessation provides support for the inverse impact law of smoking cessation [26], although further studies are needed to confirm that the bias towards studies on assisted cessation interventions that we discovered is a long-standing one and not peculiar to the years we studied. We believe there are three main synergistic drivers of the research concentration on assisted cessation and its corollary, the neglect of research on the natural history of unassisted smoking cessation. These are: the dominance of interventionism in health science research; the increasing medicalisation and commodification of cessation; and the persistent, erroneous appeal of the “hardening” hypothesis.
