This year’s Lung Cancer Awareness Month has ushered in a new sense of hopefulness about better treatments in the future for lung cancer.
Continued developments in targeted therapy are leading more oncology researchers to investigate personalized treatments for lung cancer. It’s important to note that lung cancer was one of the first cancers in which targeted therapy was found to help a segment of people dealing with late-stage lung cancer. Today’s newer targeted therapies offer the promise of improved treatment outcomes for many more types of lung cancer. For more information, read CancerCare’s free publications, A New Class of Drugs: Targeted Treatments for Cancer, Progress in the Treatment of Lung Cancer, and Your Guide to the Latest Cancer Research and Treatments (Lung Cancer).
Unfortunately, people coping with lung cancer are still saddled with a significant emotional burden arising from the stigma of the diagnosis, which can have a negative impact on the views of even the professionals themselves who treat lung cancer patients. The stigma also exacerbates emotional stress among family members of the lung cancer patient, especially when that person has a smoking history. And, patients themselves often react with guilt and shame to their lung cancer diagnosis which may interfere with their doing all they can to comply with their treatment.
A great deal of work needs to be done to address the social stigma of lung cancer so that the diagnosis, like all other cancers, can finally be acknowledged as a “no fault” medical event for patients. Because the simple fact is, no one deserves lung cancer.
