Every October, the world is awash in bright pink and around the clock promotions to raise money and awareness for breast cancer, a terrible disease for which the amount of funding and awareness is the source of envy for every other cancer.  It's great for the world of breast cancer, but it also highlights all of the shortcomings of messaging that other cancers, such as lung cancer, need to do better.  Breast cancer is widely perceived as the greatest cancer killer, it is funded extremely well, and victims of breast cancer generally don't feel the stigma of their disease.  In contrast, lung cancer has a clear ribbon to denote it being the invisible cancer, overwhelmingly leading as the #1 cause of cancer death in the US but largely unrecognized for it, with less than 1/10th the amount of funding per lung cancer death compared with breast cancer, and with the overwhelming majority of patients feeling some sense of stigma from either having smoked or being presumed to have smoked. The prevalent view from far too many people is that lung cancer is a self-inflicted disease that does not deserve our funding or our sympathy, a "blame the victim" mentality that I believe stems from the natural temptation to identify something that enables others to feel they aren't vulnerable.

Except that anyone with lungs is susceptible to lung cancer.

So I ask, at the beginning of lung cancer awareness month, for your input on what the most important message or messages should be about lung cancer. Is it the magnitude of the disease, that it is the leading cancer killer in both men and women in most of the world? Is it that approximately 80% of people now diagnosed with lung cancer in the US either never smoked or quit smoking years ago? Is it that jumping in with "did you smoke?" as the first question to ask someone you've learned has lung cancer wounds people? Is it that funding for lung cancer is tragically insufficient, especially compared with many other cancers? Or should we focus on the hopeful developments, that we have an ever-growing array of new treatments that are improving survival for a large proportion of people with lung cancer?

No matter how lung cancer touches you, you have some perception of lung cancer and how it is perceived by other people.  So I ask you to do two things:

1) Share your thoughts here about what are the most pressing messages to convey in lung cancer awareness month.

2) Share the leading points in some way with other people who aren't already committed to the cause. Whether it's on Facebook, Twitter, or talking to neighbors/friends/coworkers IRL (in real life), share the overlooked facts being discussed by the lung cancer community that you see and hear. Follow the #LCSM hashtag on twitter (and tweet a new fact about lung cancer every day in November) and the community on Facebook if you can. 

There's a lot of perception to change, but all of the biggest problems have taken years to provide that education. It will happen much faster if many, many of us do it however we can.