The next time you hear that a friend of a friend was just diagnosed with lung cancer, you’re bound to wonder privately or out loud: Was he a smoker or not?
It’s only natural. We’re terrified of cancer, and especially, cancers such as lung cancer which are diagnosed usually in late stage, and oftentimes too late to really do much about it. So we all must hear what we need to hear that, yes, this person was or still is a smoker. Phew! We can again comfortably assign blame to some poor soul who should have known better or couldn’t muster the willpower to quit in time. And we think, I don’t smoke, so I’m innocent.
But increasingly we hear from multiple quarters that non-smokers and never-smokers also get lung cancer. In fact, approximately 10 percent of all lung cancer is diagnosed in persons who never smoked. That inconvenient reality surprises a lot of people. In other words, someone who didn’t have it coming to them just got really bad news, despite his or her good behavior, unlike those weak and irresponsible smokers. Some lung cancer advocates report this aberrance, in an attempt to add accurate perspective on the disease. Even more important, researchers are now investigating the differences between tumor types in never-smokers vs. smokers, and why women never-smokers bear a greater burden of disease.
But here’s a radical notion for you, one that I recently suggested to a group of lung cancer advocates gathered in Denver by the National Lung Cancer Partnership: Lung cancer is 100 percent a disease of innocents. I repeat, innocents.
I put forth the proposition that the lifelong female smoker diagnosed with lung cancer is no more “to blame” for her disease than another woman diagnosed with breast cancer. Here’s why. Tobacco use most often begins in our teen years. Raise your hand if you never did anything stupid as a 14-year old. The Army and Navy once distributed cigarettes free to hundreds of thousands of men to help them cope with battle stress. Tobacco companies handed out free samples on college campuses. I once found a copy of an ad for Lucky Strikes that depicts a doctor extolling the virtues of smoking. The best part is, the ad ran in a 1940s edition of The Journal of the American Medical Association. I framed the ad for my office.
Finally, many children today still pick up the bad habit from their parents or older siblings.
It’s interesting to observe that while epidemiologists understand the strong connection between tobacco use and many cancers, most people would never think of asking whether a woman with breast or ovarian cancer had smoked. But today, we must still attach blame for lung cancer to smokers?
Now, my next proposal might make some people mad, but it’s also time to stop talking about lung cancer among never-smokers as a means to legitimize lung cancer. It just doesn’t work. Distinguishing the minority who never smoked may absolve that group from blame, but unwittingly and hurtfully reinforces the stigma of lung cancer due to the clear majority who smoke(d).
It’s time to switch attitudes. When you next learn of someone diagnosed with lung cancer, consider not asking whether he or she smokes. What’s the point? Lung cancer kills innocent people, period.
We need to ground out this stigma, and it’s not going to be easy. We’re addicted to blame in lung cancer.
But it’s time Congress saw fit to dedicate appropriate funding for lung cancer research. Lung cancer kills nearly four times as many people as breast cancer, yet breast cancer receives more than 10 times the government funding than lung cancer. Reducing lung cancer stigma could play an important new role in correcting this imbalance.
Lung cancer kills far more, but receives far less in government research dollars.
Also, we need to support organizations such as the National Lung Cancer Partnership and the Lung Cancer Alliance to help them call more attention to the need for progress in research, advocacy and support.
It’s time that lung cancer won the respect it deserves. It’s by far the leading cause of cancer death among women, more than all the other cancers combined. It’s time to address the stigma that burdens our misperception of lung cancer, and that keeps it in the shadows of far more “socially redeeming” tumor types.