Joel Spitzer has been
a leading authority in the development and
implementation of smoking cessation and prevention
programs for 40 years. Far from just following and
teaching the
commonly held beliefs of the day, he has been a
visionary who recognized early on that nicotine was an
addiction while the rest of the medical and scientific
community contended it was simply a habit. His unique
insight allowed him to develop and implement nicotine
prevention and intervention strategies that were decades
ahead of their time. Participants in his clinics have
success in quitting at rates that far exceed the
national average for such programs.
Currently he is serving as
Educational Director for a smoking prevention and
cessation Internet website,
WhyQuit.com that averages more than two million
visitors per year. His materials are being widely utilized
on many Internet based quit sites.
Joel Spitzer has been
providing smoking cessation and prevention services
since 1972, first as a
volunteer speaker and then a 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, and
then as a consultant for the Skokie Illinois Health
Department and the Evanston Department of Health and
Human Services, providing state funded smoking cessation
clinics and seminars for the two Chicago suburban
communities.
He has conducted over
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.
Besides smoking cessation
clinics, he has developed and presented smoking
education seminars to both adult and school age groups.
Since 1972, he has presented over
690 one-session seminars
to approximately 100,000 people. He has been a main
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. He has done many radio, television, newspaper
and magazine interviews.
He has written over 100
articles used as part of the follow-up reinforcement for
participants of his Stop Smoking Clinics. Most of these
articles have been compiled into an e-book that can be
downloaded in an Adobe Postscript Format by
clicking on
ntap.pdf. Since August
of 2005 over 4.6 million copies of his book have been
downloaded off the Internet.
In 2006 he began producing
self-help videos and
MP3 audio files available on the Internet at
index-mp3.html
and at YouTube at
www.YouTube.com/joelspitz. Since October 2006 over
4.1 million of these video and audio files have been
accessed from these online resources.
All of these online
resources; the articles, books, audio and videos
are available at no charge.
He has been involved in
other aspects of health promotion. He has done public
speaking on lifestyle and fitness, weight control, drug
abuse, cancer prevention and cancer early diagnosis.
