tobacco dependence

(Mayo Clinic) Global Bridges, a health-care alliance for tobacco dependence treatment based at Mayo Clinic, and its regional partner, King Hussein Cancer Center in Amman, Jordan, announced today that they will start training health care providers in the Eastern Mediterranean Region on how to successfully treat tobacco users.

Patients in 84% of the nation's Medicaid programs have access to tobacco-dependence treatment, but the availability and extent of coverage varied significantly, researchers found.

A perspectives article from the April 1 issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine has provoked a slowly growing controversy.

(1) Let me summarize the main points of the article before getting to the controversy.

As the title, "the case for treating tobacco dependence as a chronic disease," suggests, the authors argue "for some smokers, long-term pharmacotherapy [which] is the difference between tobacco abstinence and lifelong smoking," based on the argument that smoking is like a chronic disease.