cutting through the jargon

To understand success rates, we first need to understand the language that researchers use.

Researchers only very rarely provide an actual success rate as the 'man in the street' would define it (which is strange because it’s not difficult to calculate). More frequently they compare success rates vs. placebo and express the improvement as an Odds Ratio (OR). So if a treatment works twice as well as placebo, then it is given an OR of 2. If it is half as effective the OR is 0.5.

The placebo effect is said to double a treatment’s effectiveness. So if you gave one group nothing and another group a placebo, you would expect the placebo group to do twice as well due to the placebo effect.

So if we assume that the success rate for someone using no quit smoking aid is 3-5% (this figure is accepted by everyone in the quit smoking industry) then the success rate for a placebo anything would be double that – around 6-10%. With that in mind, let’s take a look at the success rates for various quit smoking methods.

Next ...success rates for the quit smoking patch, gum, drugs etc.>>