Getting Our Facts Straight

When I began sharing my lung cancer diagnosis, most people responded with great compassion and love. Offers of rides to the doctor, housekeeping, meals, visits, cards, healing gifts, prayers, all those beautiful kind things people do to ease the bad news were, and continue to be so welcome and appreciated.

But many of us who have lung cancer also get questioned pretty quickly about whether or not we smoke or have been smokers. There are a number of reasons for that, of course, but the main one is that we have been trained by established discourse to believe that smoking equals lung cancer and that we can "prevent lung cancer" by not smoking. Neither of those things is true. While smoking is one of the many risk factors that can contribute to the development of lung cancer, today almost 80% of lung cancer patients are non-smokers (former or never-smokers). In other words, the majority of people with lung cancer do not smoke now or have never smoked.  About 20% of those people are never-smokers. We need to get our facts straight, folks. As with so many other cancers, ANYONE CAN GET LUNG CANCER.

For more about what this means in terms of the sort of (mis)information we're still getting about lung cancer EVEN AT SCIENTIFIC CONFERENCES ON THE SUBJECT, please visit the wonderful blog post by the brilliant Lisa Goldman at Every Breath I Take in which she professionally and thoughtfully addresses the scientific community on the error of their ways! I love Lisa's writing; she's one of our community's strongest advocates, and I'm grateful for her voice.