AAMC Honors Schroeder as Anti-Smoking Crusader

UCSF Professor Steven Schroeder, MD, won’t quit until every American does – smoking, that is. For the past 40 years, Schroeder, Distinguished Professor in Health and Health Care and director of UCSF’s Smoking Cessation Leadership Center, has worked to engage the medical community in helping people kick the nicotine habit – efforts that have extended and improved the lives of millions of Americans, his colleagues say. At its annual meeting in November, the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) presented Schroeder with the David E. Rogers Award, which recognizes a medical school faculty member “who has made major contributions to improving the health and health care of the American people,” according to the AAMC website. “It’s no exaggeration to say that Dr. Schroeder was instrumental in getting us to view cigarette smoking as a disease and not a habit,” said Sam Hawgood, MB, BS, interim dean of the UCSF School of Medicine and chair of the Department of Pediatrics. Schroeder said he has long been aware of the devastating toll that smoking takes on an individual’s health. In addition to teaching and conducting research, “I always had an active practice,” he said in a phone interview. “I lost a lot of people to smoking, and it broke my heart. It’s such a preventable thing.” After graduating from Harvard Medical School and holding faculty appointments at Harvard and George Washington University, Schroeder was recruited to UCSF in 1976. He became part of the core faculty of what is today the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies. In addition, in 1979, he created a Division of General Medicine at the University. Early on at UCSF, Schroeder set his sights on changing the behavior of smokers and would-be smokers. In 1978, he co-authored a study, “Merchandising of Cigarettes in Pharmacies: A San Francisco Survey.” In 1990, Schroeder left UCSF to begin a 12-year stint as president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the country’s largest philanthropic organization devoted to health and health care. He said he was hired “because or in spite of” the fact that he told his interviewers that by omitting smoking prevention and cessation from its agenda, the foundation had “underdeveloped the ‘improving health’ part of its mission.” Convincing foundation staff and board members to focus more on substance abuse wasn’t easy, Schroeder said. The first board vote on the proposal ended in a tie. “Half thought it was a terrific idea, and the other half acknowledged it was a good thing in a theoretical sense, but they were concerned the tobacco industry would attempt to sully the foundation’s name,” he said. In the end, the board reached a compromise: The foundation would initially target underage drinking and smoking, and see how that went. It went extremely well, and in the years that followed, Schroeder helped launch many national smoking cessation projects, including the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, SmokeLess States and the Substance Abuse Policy Research Program. “What is remarkable about Dr. Schroeder is that he not only changed the way Americans view cigarettes, but he also came up with a model for how a philanthropic foundation can use its resources to directly bring about change,” Hawgood said. In 2003, Schroeder returned to UCSF to lead the Smoking Cessation Leadership Center, which is funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The center aims to “increase smoking cessation rates and increase the number of health professionals who help smokers quit,” according to the foundation website. Currently, smoking causes an estimated 438,000 deaths in the United States every year, the National Cancer Institute reports. Studies have shown that counseling from a health professional – or even a physician’s simple advice to stop smoking – improves smoking cessation rates. Only 3 percent to 5 percent of smokers are able to quit using willpower alone, Schroeder said. But that figure jumps to nearly 30 percent when a smoker receives counseling or participates in a quitting program. “We like to see the glass as one-third full instead of two-thirds empty,” Schroeder said of the 30 percent success rate. The Smoking Cessation Leadership Center is currently branching out to form partnerships with the mental health community, Schroeder said, noting that people suffering from mental illness consume roughly 44 percent of the cigarettes sold in the United States. He was quick to add that the center is not the only group on campus contributing to the anti-smoking cause. “UCSF is one of the world leaders in smoking cessation. The University should be really proud,” he said.