Why and how to get patients to stop smoking

Despite the fact that smoking cigarettes harms oral and systemic health, there is little current evidence of successful primary dental care involvement in smoking cessation. This paper aims to present the arguments for developing the role of primary dental care in smoking cessation and reviews the current literature on how this can be achieved in practice. It is argued that it is timely to incorporate this rapidly developing evidence base on what works in smoking cessation into primary dental care activity.