National smokeout day is a great idea, don’t get me wrong. Smoking is the leading cause of lung cancer, not to speak of the other ways it can damage health. But during National Lung Cancer Awareness month, I think we should have a day titled “Smokeout the Stigma of Lung Cancer” day. Why?
Consider someone with cancer. What is the first thing you say or think upon learning they have breast cancer? Now contrast that with your first comment or silent thought when you meet someone living with lung cancer. “How long did you smoke?” “Have you tried quitting smoking?” “Too bad he didn’t quit smoking sooner.” Rather than the empathy and unconditional support we offer those with other forms of cancer, we harbor subconscious judgments – that somehow those with lung cancer deserve it.
I can hear the “buts” as I write. Isn’t it extra important on smokeout day, that we encourage those living with lung cancer to quit? After all, don’t most people who develop lung cancer smoke? No they don’t. Over 50% of those who develop lung cancer are former or never smokers. And for women, this disease that kills twice as many as does breast cancer, 20% have never touched a cigarette. They still experience the stigma.
It’s not just us. Public and private funding for lung cancer research falls far behind breast cancer research, and even many physicians carry those judgments, on top of treating lung cancer survivors less aggressively. But we can only change ourselves.
So starting today, as we encourage current smokers to quit, let’s encourage our loved ones with lung cancer, by providing unconditional, nonjudgmental support, and leave the analysis of causes to the scientists. We can’t help non-smokers with lung cancer by asking how much they smoked, anymore than we can help breast cancer surivors by asking how long they were obese, or colon cancer survivors by asking how long they were sedentary. It’s time to smokeout the stigma of lung cancer.
About lynne.eldridge
Lynne Eldridge MD is a 1986 Honors Graduate from the University of Minnesota Medical School, Lynne Eldridge MD practiced primary medicine for 15 years before becoming a full time author and speaker. Now a five time national award winning author of Avoiding Cancer One Day At A Time, an internationally recognized speaker on health & wellness, and a Medical Journalist for the New York Times company About.com (see http://lungcancer.about.com), Lynne Eldridge M.D. is a visionary and passionate champion for a healthy, natural lifestyle that includes primary prevention as the key to greatly reducing your risk of getting cancer.
When my daughter was diagnosed, some of the first comments we heard were how shocked they were that smoking for what had to be a short amount of time could lead to her cancer. Brittany was just 19 when we found out she had lung cancer….and no, she was NOT a smoker. Can you imagine the kick in the stomach feel that we experienced? Well, add the sucker punch of such questions. We must change our perspective and treat all lung cancer patients with respect and courtesy, not with biased beliefs.
My heart goes out to you Tammy. As a mother myself, I can't imagine having a child diagnosed with cancer. Add to that the insensitive remarks about smoking, and I have tears dripping on my keyboard.
We have gotten past the stigma associated with some other diseases in the past, and I believe we can with lung cancer as well. Thanks for standing up despite your sorrow, and speaking for those with lung cancer.
Lynne,
You are SO right and you have struck SUCH a chord with me! I agree 100% with everything you've said because I watched my mother, who'd quit smoking 20 years earlier, die from lung cancer in three painful, miserable months last year. When she was diagnosed, she didn't smoke, didn't drink, did yoga, was an engineer with a hugely powerful job and the disease ravaged her body and took her from everyone who loved her.
When I tell people that my mom died from lung cancer, the first question they ask is "Did she smoke?" When I say "Yes, but she quit 20 years before her diagnosis," their jaws drop. No one knows that former smokers are the largest group of people to get lung cancer.
The American Cancer Society tells us that after 10 years of quitting smoking, your chances of dying from lung cancer are cut in half. You can go to their website today and under the section that talks about the benefits of quitting smoking, that's one of them. And it's wrong. As you mentioned, over 50% of people diagnosed with lung cancer are FORMER smokers. That's right. People who were addicted to one of the most powerful drugs around and managed to KICK the habit and died anyway. And when they get diagnosed, 85% of them are terminal, stage 3 or 4, which means most will not survive the disease.
Maybe my mom's cancer wasn't caused by smoking. Maybe it was. Who cares? At the end of the day, she died from lung cancer – and its not a pretty death. She didn't deserve to die from it and NO ONE deserves to die from it.
Thank you for bringing attention to this most important issue. I hope someday people are able to show compassion to those with lung cancer. And ultimately, I hope there's a day when we find a way to eradicate lung cancer forever so that no 33 year old woman needs to lose her mother as I did last year, again.
Julia Gaynor
Lynne, thank you so much for this. Your idea of a Smoke Out the
Stigma Day is brilliant. So how does one go about enacting a commemorative day? Is it legislative? Organizational? (American Lung Assoc., ACS, etc.)
I encourage you to submit this as a newspaper op-ed as well. Your status as a physician gives you extra credibility, which we sorely need. And your obvious compassion would be so reassuring to those who've encountered doctors lacking in that vital quality.
Thank you again!
Lori
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Lori Hope
Author
Thank you so much, Lynne, for bringing attention to this aspect of lung cancer. As you correctly point out, the association of the disease with smoking brings an added challenge to those fighting the disease, and their families. No one deserves lung cancer, whether they smoke now, smoked in the past, or never smoked at all. And our government does us all a disservice by not funding research into the disease at levels commensurate with its death toll. It's up to all of us to hold our public officials accountable; if we can find money to re-decorate the White House and give all our representatives top-notch health insurance, why can't we find the money to fund research that will help tackle this nation's top cancer killer? We lung cancer advocates have to be just as aggressive as the breast cancer advocates have been – this country's health depends on it.
Sincerely,
Regina Vidaver, Ph.D.
Executive Director
National Lung Cancer Partnership
Julia,
My heart goes out to you also. It hurts me that you have felt the stigma, and also learned painfully the statistics that describe lung cancer. Most people are diagnosed in the later stages, resulting in a 5-year survival not much better than 15%. I can't help but wonder – if lung cancer research had received the funding that breast cancer research has – whether that number would not be much better, and perhaps we would even have a screening tool that is effective to detect lung cancer in the early stages, as we do for some other cancers.
Lori,
Wonderful ideas. Thank you so much for the inspiration you are for so many!
Regina,
I as well can't understand why we aren't investing more to address our nations leading cancer killer. Why are we ignoring the elephant in the living room, while we decorate around it? Do you have any ideas on how to enact a commemorative day? Perhaps a day set aside where we encourage all of us to take off our blinders and compassionately look at the elephant?
Bless you for posting this. My husband passed away one year ago on November 5, 2007, from small cell lung cancer. Yes he was a smoker, as I found out everyone wanted to know. He was also a welder in his younger years and he had been exposed to other toxic chemicals in jobs he had before becoming an engineer. He was 47 when diagnosed and he was diagnosed early because the tumor was cutting off his airways, so he had been suffering with pneumonia for a few months before being diagnosed with cancer. The stigma is terrible!!! I too, thought it was so unfair that no one asks the questions to breast cancer patients of how long they were obese or how much meat they ate, etc.
I understand that only 15% of smokers ever get lung cancer, while I know that there are other problems that come up. My husband did not die from lung cancer either. He had gone in to remission from his original treatment and then had a tumor reoccur on his neck. While going through unsuccessful treatment, they decided to do radiation on his neck but also did a second radiation in his chest. The chest radiation was too much and blew a hole between his lungs and esophougus. That is how he died, very quickly, too. He had quit somking through his treatment but started again when the new cancer cropped up. He asked the Dr to put his on a smoking cessation plan but the Dr said he would do it after he was cured. I remember the day clearly when the Dr shook hands on a deal with him that as soon as he was cancer free, he would start a quit smoking program.
Due to the way my husband died, I was coerced in to looking in to a law suit. When i went to see a lawyer, an anti-smoker, he told me no jury in the US would ever convict a Dr because my husband smoked. I asked him if my husband smoking gave the drs the right to kill him, he said "basically, yes"
I never filed a lawsuit, but I am comitted to not let my husbands death be in vain. He was a very loving man with an addiction to a very powerful drug. He was treated like he deserved to die by many. If you tell our 3 daughters that he deserved to die because he smoked, it just doesn'tfly with them. They are now 13, 16 and 19 and all they know is that they had a dedicated daddy that loved them and he is gone.
I became more of a lung cancer expert than I ever planned to be through our experience. And if there is anyway I can help rid the stigma, and help support all lung cancer patients, smoker or not, COUNT ME IN. my husband signed up for every test, for markers or whatever he could. He always told his DR that he wanted his disease to make a difference in somebody elses life. His Dr always told him that he would cure him first and then he could do somehting for others. So I feel that whatever I can do to help others on my husbands behalf would also be a gift from him.
I just joined this site a few days ago. And reading this post has made me realize there was some divine intervention leading me here.
Thank you,
Teresa