Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Two yahoo groups


Today, let me introduce a couple of anti-smoking groups. The first one is NicotineBusters
(http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/NicotineBusters/), which is an on-line group of challengers trying to stop smoking and break free from the addiction. According to the description, NicotineBusters offers many helpful files and links so that participants share information and encouragement to achieve their goal of staying non-smokers. Although this group focuses on proper ways to stop smoking, I'm sure I will get sufficient information. For example, I can learn how addictive smoking is by reading stories written by former smokers. Besides, NicotineBusters has 1437 members, which are not too few or too many compared with other groups, and it was established 12 years ago, so I feel this group is reliable and trustworthy. Even though NicotineBusters requires membership to check messages, I expect no spams in this group because it is moderated to keep a high quality of help. For these reasons, I believe NicotineBusters develops a good relationship with users.
The second one is quitsmoking(http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/quitsmoking/), whose purpose is literally to help smokers quit smoking. In this group, participants discuss issues concerning cigarettes, mainly nicotine addiction, and methods of giving them up. Quitsmoking also provides us with a large-scale Website containing over 150 pages. Therefore, I think this group will be a good source of information. In fact, quitsmoking is composed of 3474 members, so the email volume is fairly high with hundreds of messages a day. However, as far as I've checked, there were no spams in this group although it is not moderated. Since it was created 13 years ago, quitsmoking has been the place where those who try to give up smoking encourage one another. Now, I'll explain some recent conversation in this group, which is about a lucky guy who gave up smoking.
The master of the thread gave up smoking two years ago and asked his physician for
prescription for a lung CT scan due to his smoking history. It came back “abnormal”, that is, if
he had continued smoking he would probably be dead now. By posting his experience, he made
us realize how dangerous smoking is considering latent damage. In fact, there were several
comments answering, “you are a lucky guy” or “I became afraid of smoking” and so on.

Yuki Taniguchi

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