Title: Chiropractors Against Tobacco
Author:
Section/SPIG: Chiropractic Health Care
Issue Date:
Submitted by Drs. Rand Baird and Cheryl Hawk
The World Federation of Chiropractic (WFC) is an international association of national chiropractic associations from over 80 nations, and has been designated as a non-governmental organization officially affiliated with the World Health Organization (WHO). WFC’s Health for All Committee is charged with coordinating WFC activities with those of the WHO. Since WHO has designated tobacco use as its single biggest cabinet-level priority, the Health for All Committee is currently focusing its efforts on addressing tobacco use.
The Health for All Committee has named this project CAT (Chiropractors Against Tobacco). CAT materials include patient information brochures and instructions and resources for chiropractors on tobacco use cessation, including colorful high-impact posters with captions in English, Spanish and French. These can all be easily downloaded from the WFC Web site and printed on a color printer or taken as a computer file to a printer for printing in quantity. Two of the posters were included in a recent issue of Dynamic Chiropractic and sent to every chiropractor in the world for office display. The CAT project also encourages DCs themselves to join and participate in local community anti-tobacco activities, including observing May 31st each year as the World Health Organization’s annual “World No Tobacco Day” and observing the American Cancer Society’s “Great American Smokeout,” which takes place on the third Thursday every November (Nov. 18 this year).
As part of its ongoing work, a pilot study of the usefulness and acceptance of these CAT materials is being undertaken now in the United States as a collaborative effort of the WFC, the Chiropractic Health Care Section of the American Public Health Association (APHA), Palmer College, and the research department of Parker College of Chiropractic with Cheryl Hawk, DC, PhD, as the principal investigator. A select group of chiropractic offices with prior experience in practice-based research was solicited, and almost immediately 30 offices eagerly volunteered to participate and began receiving training materials in April. Although small in scale, this important pilot study will help validate the materials and also could possibly lead to a larger scale study in North America or even internationally. Check out the WFC Web site at <www.wfc.org> to sample the Chiropractors Against Tobacco materials.