Detecting Lung Cancer Blog

Though some lung cancer organizations like to highlight the growing number of lung cancer victims that are non-smokers, the vast majority of lung cancer can be attributed to smoking. Why hide or diminish that reality? Let’s deal with the stigma head on-it’s a disease that is predominant with smokers and former smokers.

Society’s attitude to smoking and smokers appears to have affected advocacy, R&D funding and awareness on the early detection of lung cancer as noted in this article.

Most often, lung cancer is discovered during the course of testing for some other disease. Catching lung cancer in its early stages, when the five-year survival rate is better than 50 percent, is relatively rare. Usually, by the time the cancer is found, it has reached an advanced stage, and the chances of survival are greatly reduced.

Not surprisingly, a diagnosis of lung cancer can cause the patient to grieve. Lung cancer is a serious illness and is often detected at an advanced stage when the chances of recovery are greatly reduced. Sadness and anger at the situation seem to be a natural reaction—depression, however, is another story.

There seems to be a tendency among both the general public and health-care professionals to treat people with lung cancer differently than people with other kinds of cancer. Lung cancer, the thinking goes, is self-inflicted. It the person with the disease just hadn’t smoked, he or she would not have become ill.

It seems much more has been written about the effects of smoker’s guilt on people who have developed lung cancer than smokers who have not been diagnosed with the disease, but it appears feeling guilty about smoking might be a lung cancer risk factor.

Early detection of lung cancer can be difficult for at least two reasons:

First, symptoms of lung cancer might not show up until the cancer is well advanced.

Second, the symptoms themselves might be attributable to a variety of problems.