Two-thirds of all doctors believe patients either cannot or will not change their daily behavior in order to improve their health.This was the motivation for Dr. James O. Prochaska’s presentation, “From Theory to Methods and Research On Health Behavior Change,” which was delivered to a group of doctors and students at Rhodes Hall Auditorium Friday.”This is a health system problem,” said Prochaska, who is a professor and director of the Cancer Prevention Research Center at the University of Rhode Island.After explaining a study done with drug users, adolescents and prostitutes, Prochaska asked members of the audience what motivated people the most to begin using condoms during sex.Doctors and students called out answers like the fear of getting HIV or other sexually transmitted diseases, but Prochaska shook his head and smiled.”It was that they would be a more responsible person,” he said. “I think there is a lesson to be learned here about stereotypes.”To avoid setting patients up for failure, Prochaska recommends helping them break bad habits such as smoking, taking drugs and having unsafe sex by going through stages of gradual change.The first stage is pre-contemplation. People find themselves in this stage partly because of ignorance, Prochaska said.”People try to stop (bad habits) many times and many ways, and fail,” he said. “So they are in this stage out of demoralization.”The next stage is contemplation. People are in this stage for a long time because there is a high amount of confusion due to mixed messages from doctors and advertisements, he said.”(Physicians) usually expect more of people than they are willing to do,” he said.The other stages of change include preparation, action, maintenance, and termination. Action requires a lot of intense work while maintenance involves sticking to the changes, he said. The goal physicians and counselors should have is to instill the idea that patients should always use a condom during sex, he said.”With many people, it’s probably more of a lifetime of maintenance,” he said.An important issue for public health intervention is recruitment, he said. People usually aren’t willing to come looking for help during a preventative stage. The problem is, doctors are the people who usually are not ready for unmotivated people, rather than the other way around, he said.”It is important to have great confidence in our principles,” he said.An important process is giving patients realistic goals rather than asking them to undergo immediate change, he said.Prochaska’s presentation was the first in the HIV/AIDS Research Seminar Series funded by the Ohio State University Research Seminar Program.The purpose of the series is to bring top researchers together and discuss important health issues, said Dr. Bonnie J. Garvin, chair and associate professor of adult health and illness nursing at OSU.The seminars will not only benefit the university community but the community at large, said Susan Huntington, dean of the OSU Graduate School.