Lung cancer patients fight stigma

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - "I'm sorry. You don't have breast cancer," the oncologist told Charmaine Atkenson.

The 48-year-old mother of two had something far worse -- stage 4 lung cancer. It had spread to her spine, bursting the bone open. It was not only a sentence of death; it was a judgment.

Even though Atkenson never smoked, she felt almost ashamed. "I found that I never would even say what kind of cancer I had. Or I would always start by saying I never smoked and I never lived with a smoker," she said in a telephone interview.

Lung cancer patients, advocates and specialists are meeting this week in Chicago, alongside the annual American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting, to try to dispel some of that shame.

Atkenson is there, taking part in an "advocacy summit" -- the group's first attempt to organize a movement akin to the powerful groups that have lobbied successfully to get more funding for breast and prostate cancer research.

Dr. Joan Schiller of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and the National Lung Cancer Partnership said lung cancer carries a stigma that no other cancer does.

"They feel ashamed of their cancer. They feel guilty about their cancer," said Schiller, who published a study last year in the Journal of Thoracic Oncology showing primary care doctors were less likely to send lung cancer patients to a cancer specialist than patients with other types of cancer.

This means doctors, researchers and even patients are not pressing as hard for better therapies as they do for other cancers.