Text2Quit

They stole my idea! Every morning for almost a month I sent a text message to my son (when he was living in AZ) in an attempt to motivate him to quit smoking. Now I read there’s an app (several different ones actually) for that and one program called Text2Quit is seeing some success. The researchers, from the Milken Institute School of Public Health at the George Washington University (Milken Institute SPH), used Text2Quit to convince 11 percent of smokers to ignore their cravings via text messaging in a new study, whereas only 5 percent of the control group remained smoke-free at the end of a six-month program. With Text2Quit, quitters had the option of texting back with questions and reaching out for help to fight cravings. The researchers also used saliva samples from their subjects at the end of the study to verify their results. Now Text2Quit has enrolled 75,000 people in the United States in their program, (my idea). As for the results of my month long texting campaign to encourage my son quit smoking…I received a text one day explaining that the person I was texting didn’t smoke. In fact I was texting a wrong number, not my son after all. I was just off by one digit…. Then they politely asked me to quit.