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Joel Spitzer has been a leading authority in the development and implementation of smoking cessation and prevention programs for over 30 years. Far from just following and teaching the commonly held beliefs of the day, he recognized early on that nicotine was an addiction while most of the medical and scientific community contended it was simply a habit. His early insights allowed him to develop and implement nicotine prevention and intervention strategies that were decades ahead of their time. Participants in Joel's clinics have success in quitting at rates that far exceed the national average for such programs.
Since 2000 he has served as Director of Education at WhyQuit.com, a volunteer position for which he has never accepted any form of compensation, fee or donation whatsoever, either direct or indirect. Visit WhyQuit's Financial Disclosure page for more detailed information.
Joel Spitzer also serves as a smoking prevention and cessation consultant to the Evanston Department of Health and Human Services. His online materials are widely and freely utilized by many Internet based quitting sites.
Joel has been providing smoking cessation and prevention services since 1972, first as a volunteer speaker, then as member of the professional staff of the American Cancer Society, and later as the smoking programs coordinator for the Rush North Shore Medical Center's Good Health Program. The story of how a young never-smoker started reaching out to much older smokers is inspiring in its own way.
He has conducted more than 350 six-session stop smoking clinics to over 4,500 participants, including programs for major corporations, medium and small sized companies, universities, health departments and numerous hospitals in the Metropolitan Chicago area.
In addition to nicotine cessation clinics, Joel has developed and presented smoking education seminars to both adult and school age groups. Since 1972, he has presented more than 690 single-session seminars. Joel has been a primary speaker on the physical, psychological and social aspects of smoking at over 30 major conferences on smoking and health throughout Illinois. He has trained physician and lay speakers for the American Cancer Society.
Joel has conducted numerous radio, television, newspaper and magazine interviews. He authored more than 100 quitting articles that were intended as follow-up reinforcement lessons for participants who had attended his stop smoking clinics but are today being shared at quitting forums across the Internet.
Most of Joel's reinforcement articles have been compiled into a free 1.4MB PDF e-book entitled "Never Take Another Puff," which can be directly downloaded at http://www.whyquit.com/joel. More than 859,000 copies of Never Take Another Puff have been downloaded since August 2005.
In 2006 Joel established "AskJoel," where both quitters and those still dependent upon nicotine could submit their questions to Joel.
In October of 2006, Joel added a new feature to the WhyQuit site, a free video library, with more than 60 videos providing over 10 hours of lessons, covering materials taught in his six-session clinics. Since being first introduced, more than 240,000 of these videos have been viewed via the Internet.
Joel Spitzer can be contacted via email at quitsmoking@joelspitzer.com, or you can write to: Joel Spitzer c/o Evanston Health Department, 2100 Ridge Avenue Evanston, Illinois 60201 USA.
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