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.
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