The end of a year is always a time for reflection on the past alongside hope for the future, so our upcoming lung cancer social media tweet chat on twitter (#LCSM on twitter) will focus on everyone's thoughts of the most significant developments in lung cancer over the past year, along with predictions and hopes for the coming year.

Please join us Thursday, January 2nd at 8 PM Eastern, 5 PM Pacific on Twitter, using the hashtag #LCSM to follow and add to our one-hour chat with the global lung cancer community, where we'll cover the following three questions:

This Thursday, November 7th at 8 PM Eastern, 5 PM Pacific, we'll gather in the Twitterverse for another one hour #LCSM (lung cancer social media) tweet chat.

One ongoing controversy in the world of managing cancer, especially one in which cures are elusive, is how high the bar should be to guide treatment recommendations.  The "gold standard" to change treatment is a significant improvement in the primary endpoint, ideally overall survival, in a prospective, randomized phase III trial with several hundred or even several thousand people. In some settings, treatment recommendations may not even change until a few randomized phase III trials show the same significant improvement with a new treatment approach.

We are in the midst of a remarkable transitional time in cancer care that is exciting but challenging, since we now have patients divided into smaller and smaller groups based on molecular markers.  Along with that, more and more patients and caregivers are participating in social media and online discussion groups.  What are the implications for these changes, and how can we use them to accelerate the pace of clinical research?  I'd like to focus on a couple of key questions for our next lung cancer tweetchat on September 26, at 8 PM Eastern, 5 PM Pacific.

The concept of "over-treatment" of lung cancer may sound heretical to some here, as it is unquestionably a fearsome cancer. Nevertheless, it's important to recognize that cancers can range from quite indolent to virulently aggressive and that some forms may be so minimally threatening that treatment may be worse than the disease.