Lung Cancer Stigma
The lung cancer is one of the deadliest forms of cancer, but even so, the doctors do not investigate it as much as the other types, because they do not get the right amount of money for research. There is a stigma related to the lung cancer, and that is that the one who suffers from it, is responsible because he or she has brought it up upon himself or herself by smoking.
The thing is that from all the lung cancer patients, about 20% of them have never smoked a cigarette in their life, and even so they are still including in the category of the smokers. When one says he has lung cancer, the people automatically assume that the person smokes and as a result they somewhat consider him responsible for being sick.
There are also places where more than 35 percent of the people who have this type of cancer have never smoked in their life and they have never lives with people who smoked either. Lung cancer is responsible for killing more than 160,000 people each year. The numbers are very high, as colon, breast, and prostate cancer combined kill less than that sum in a year. The lung cancer is strongly related to the blame element. Whenever one gets lung cancer he is the one responsible for it. This situation is similar with the liver cancer, where many of the people assume that the one, who has it, has it because he drank too much. Even so, people might be more understanding when it comes to that type of cancer because they assume that it might have developed for other reasons, but in the case of the lung cancer they are not so sympathetic.
Dr. Michael Thun, an epidemiologist at the American Cancer Society, said that the lung cancer is underfunded and the main reason for this is that the people believe that the ones who have it are responsible for it. Because of this misconception the research for lung cancer treatment does not receive the same funding as the other cancers, and as a result, the patients are the ones who have to suffer from it. He also revealed the hypocrisy behind the entire situation. He stated that a very large percent of the people who have suffered from lung cancer in the last 10 years of so, have been smoking from periods when the cigarette was not considered harmful. He said that a few decades ago, the doctors were the ones who recommended the cigarettes, not knowing about the effects which they can have on the health of the smokers. Cigarettes were being offered for free to the students and to the ones from the military, and cigarette commercials were broadcasted to television. He also accused the current industry which created the “light” cigarettes, which in fact have more nicotine than the regular ones and as a result they are even more addicting.
Dr. Joan Schiller, an oncologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas stated that the people should not be treated this way even if they are somewhat responsible for getting cancer. He mentioned that it is not fair to them, especially since blaming them can worsen their health state even more. He also mentioned that many of the people who smoke have become addicted at an early age, and since the addiction is very powerful they could not quit smoking. Dr. Schiller also mentioned about all the women who get lung cancer without smoking. He said that all those women are being accused for getting lung cancer, whereas the women who have breast cancer are treated completely opposite. She mentioned that more people get lung cancer without ever smoking a cigarette then they get AIDS or leukemia. If those patients would be placed in a different category, then their form of cancer would be the sixth or seventh most common cause of cancer-related death.
In most of the cases, smoking-related cancer occurs in the case of the older people; usually they have at least 71 years when they are diagnosed with it. There are also cases when the non-smokers get the disease, and in their case they are diagnosed at earlier ages, such as 30s and 40s, and in some unfortunate cases when they are only in their 20s. The problem is that the lung cancer is very difficult to diagnose, especially since the doctors do not suspect it especially in the case of the people who have never smoked. In more than half of the cases, the lung cancer is diagnosed when it is in an advance stage, and as a result the treatment would be ineffective.
Most of the people are treated for other diseases such as pneumonia, or bronchitis. Even when the patient does an X-ray, the cancer is not very obvious, because it looks like pneumonia, and as a result the doctors might offer their patients treatment for pneumonia.Even if the cancer is found out in early stages, it has a high mortality rate. It has been estimated that abut 10 percent of the people who have been diagnosed with lung cancer will live more than 5 years after the diagnosis. Dr. Heather Wakelee, an oncologist at Stanford University, stated that there have been made enormous progresses for the non-smokers who have developed cancer. They have developed a medicine which can attack the mutations which cause the cancer to spread, but so far the treatment is effective in approximately 30 percent of the cases. She is aware that curing cancer might be very difficult, but her main task is to increase the life of the ones who have it, or to make it a chronic disease, just like diabetes is. The most common factor for developing lung cancer in the case of the non-smokers is the passive smoking. People who live with smokers have higher chances of developing lung cancer than the ones who live with non-smoking persons.
