Help is out there to stop smoking, even if it's your 30th attempt

WEDNESDAY was no smoking day. Have you survived the first three days? If so, well done. If not, don't worry, you'll crack it one day.

So why is no smoking day important? For someone who has smoked for years, is it worth giving up?

I apologise. Doctors are always banging on about smoking: trying to impose a nanny state. Why shouldn't people smoke in pubs and clubs if the landlords don't mind?

One of the problems is tobacco was believed to be safe for the first 400 years of smoking in England.

It was even believed to improve health. I have a home doctor book from 1890 which advocates moving to Torquay and smoking tobacco as a treatment for asthma.

A retired rep from a pharmaceutical company told me he was taught an interesting sales technique in the 1950s.

Go into the doctor's consulting room and offer him a cigarette (it was always a 'him').

In the time it took for the rep and the doctor to smoke a cigarette he could sell his product.

It was in the 1950s and 1960s that the real dangers of smoking were discovered.

Just after the Second World War there was a massive increase in lung cancer. And it was the rare types, squamous cell and oat cell, which became very common. What was happening?

Professor Doll from Oxford looked at the problem. Initially it was thought to be the increase in cars but the statistics did not fit.

But there had been a massive increase in smoking during the First World War.

Pipes and cigars were mainly smoked by the middle and upper classes, but cigarettes had become cheap. Twenty to 30 years later, the young men who survived the trenches became middle-aged men with lung cancer.

Even the researchers found their own evidence hard to believe.

Everyone smoked. It cannot be dangerous, but many doctors did believe it and gave up. These doctors were followed up and their levels of lung cancer fell.

Over the years there have been hundreds of pieces of research linking smoking with lung cancer, bronchitis, heart and circulation disease, bladder cancer and many other problems.

We also know 'passive smoking', being surrounded by smokers, also carries a risk.

Today's statistics are frightening: 160,000 people die every year in the UK from smoking-related diseases, most from lung cancer, heart disease and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease or COPD.

Eight out of 10 non-smokers live past 70, but only half the smokers will live to see their 70th birthday.

I can bore you with statistics for hours but they all point in the same direction. Smoking is lethal.

It is easy to look at the dangers of smoking but harder to give up. There are numerous techniques.

You can just stop and suffer withdrawal symptoms, try hypnosis, acupuncture, tablets or nicotine replacement.

The nicotine replacement can be taken as patches, gum, inhalations or nose sprays.

None of these ideas are right and none of them are wrong. What works for one person may not work for someone else.

Another useful trick is to put the money aside you would have spent on cigarettes and spend it on yourself.

I remember a couple who gave up smoking in the new year and by September had enough money for a holiday in the Canary Islands.

And help is available. GPs' surgeries have specially trained staff who can help, but there is also help on line and walk-in NHS clinics.

Even if you've tried over and over again it is still worth another go.

Ask anyone who has successfully given up and they will tell you they tried 20 or 30 times before being successful.

If you've made it three days after no smoking day — well done. If not don't worry.