1986 Articles

Cigarette smoking among physicians, dentists, and nurses

Garfinkel, Lawrence; Stellman, Steven D.

Smoking habits of Americans have changed substantially over the past several decades, in large part because of the increasing knowledge and publicity regarding health hazards of tobacco consumption. It is to be expected that physicians and other health professionals would be in the vanguard of smoking reduction, and previous studies show that whereas in the 1950s more than 50 percent of physicians smoked, by 1975 the prevalence had dropped to about 20 percent. We present here a portrait of smoking habits in 11,324 physicians, 2,892 dentists, and 44,568 nurses enrolled in Cancer Prevention Study II, a cohort study of 1.2 million US men and women initially surveyed in 1982. Our data show, for example, that 16.7 percent of physicians in this sample were current smokers. Smoking prevalence was slightly lower in dentists (14.1 percent) but considerably greater in nurses (23.6 percent of female nurses and 41.3 percent of male nurses). Male doctors who continue to smoke consume more cigarettes per day than female doctors who are current smokers. These data are generally consistent with population studies, and reinforce the notion that health professionals should be exemplars with respect to health behaviors such as smoking.