Kicking the Habit

While the days of cigarette ads featuring smiling physicians are long gone, even today there remains a hypocritical culture of poor health among doctors. While it would seem that the very people whose job is to maintain the health of their patients would make better health decisions than smoking, the high-stress life of medicine has been the most common reason for engaging in this addictive habit. To combat this, Harvard Medical School (HMS) recently announced a cigarette smoking ban on campus grounds—a move highly consistent with the mission of the school and a strong step forward in promoting better health among the doctors of tomorrow.

The ban, which was announced by HMS Dean Jeffery S. Flier last Monday, is not only going to encourage students, faculty, and staff to kick their habits, but will also minimize the impact of second-hand smoking on non-smokers. And while most patients don’t normally take smoking breaks with their physicians, the hypocrisy of a smoker imparting health advice certainly does damage to the doctor-patient relationship.

Beyond the merits of the ban itself, the method of implementation is laudable for its foresight: Rather than placing an immediate ban on cigarettes, the administration delayed the ban for one calendar year, which will hopefully allow many of those who smoke enough time to quit before their jobs will effectively force them to. Moreover, HMS will be providing support to its smoking staff and students in the form of smoking cessation programs. Such programs reiterate the Med School’s emphasis on long-term healthy habits, rather than a mere attempt to cleanse its campus of toxic smoke.

HMS is not the first of the schools of Harvard University to ban smoking from its grounds; the Harvard School of Public Health and Harvard School of Dental Medicine have already put in place similar regulations, so the question could be asked, why not the rest of Harvard? The difference lies in the mission of the each school: The rest of the schools of the University are not specifically health-care driven and ought not implement seemingly paternalistic policies simply to follow suit. That being said, the sizable body of evidence supporting the deleterious effects of cigarettes will hopefully encourage individual Harvard students, faculty, and administrators to voluntarily quit smoking. Unlike doctors, we do not have a professional responsibility to live healthily, but, as informed citizens, we should consciously work to be healthy ourselves and to reduce the harms of second-hand smoke.