ABSTRACT
Despite gains to deter smoking and efforts to promote smoking cessation, smoking continues to be a major health challenge around the globe. In addition to causing physical harm to nearly every bodily system, smoking reduces overall life expectancy. Providing cost-effective and appealing programs to achieve smoking cessation or significant reductions in smoking is invaluable to public health. Hypnosis shows promise as an adjunctive cognitive-behavioral therapy strategy for achieving smoking cessation. In this chapter, we review the health implications of smoking, discuss treatment efficacy, and evaluate the benefits of incorporating hypnosis into a multidimensional smoking cessation treatment protocol. We describe the numerous components of our Winning Edge program for smoking cessation, highlighting how our approach utilizes hypnosis to promote and maintain treatment gains.
